Florian Mölders has successfully (summa cum laude) defended his doctoral thesis "Development, trade agreements and knowledge spillovers - Five empirical essays" at the University of Duisburg-Essen in February 2014. His thesis was supervised by Professor Ansgar Belke, University of Duisburg-Essen and Professor Matthias Busse, Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Since September 2009, Florian Mölders has been a doctoral student at the DIW Berlin Graduate Center and since September 2010, he has been working as a researcher at the department Firms and Markets. After submitting his thesis in August 2013, he changed to the International Finance Corporation (IFC, World Bank Group) in Paris.