Jette Steen Knudsen

Jette Steen Knudsen

Professor
Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of International Business

Contact Information

Research/Areas of Interest

My work is interdisciplinary and draws primarily on political science and business and society scholarship. I study the interface between government regulation and business, with a particular focus on corporate sustainability, political business risk and corporate governance. My current research examines the regulation of sustainable finance. In a new project with Casper Berg Lavmand Larsen, I study regulatory polarization: how multinational companies navigate incompatible regulatory demands from the EU and the US, particularly on climate change and DEI.

Education

  • BS, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark, 1988
  • MA, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, United States, 1995
  • PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, United States, 2001

Biography

ette Steen Knudsen is Professor of Policy and International Business and holds the Shelby Cullom Davis Chair in Sustainability. She also holds a professorship at Copenhagen Business School (CBS) with the Center for Corporate Governance and is affiliated with the CBS Center for Sustainability. From 2021 to 2024 she served as President of the Tufts University Faculty Senate.

Her research centers on the interface between government regulation and business, with a particular focus on corporate sustainability, political business risk and corporate governance. Her current research examines the regulation of sustainable finance. With Casper Berg Lavmand Larsen, she is also leading a new project on regulatory polarization that explores how multinational companies navigate regulatory incompatibility between the EU and the US on climate change and DEI. She is guest editor of special issues of the Journal of Management Studies on the governance of sustainability and of Regulation & Governance on hope in times of uncertainty.

Her book with Jeremy Moon, Visible Hands: Government Regulation of Corporate Social Responsibility in Global Business, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. She has published in journals including Business Ethics Quarterly, British Journal of Industrial Relations, Business and Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Business Ethics, Policy and Politics, Political Studies and Regulation & Governance.

Knudsen advises leading companies and international organizations, such as the Asian Development Bank, on the governance of sustainability. She also lectures in CBS's program on supervisory board management. From 2003 to 2007 she headed The Copenhagen Centre for CSR, a government-sponsored think tank. She then led a CSR task force for the CEO of Maersk, at the time a shipping, oil and retail conglomerate. She received her PhD in Political Science from MIT in 2001.