Psychologie des entrepreneurs, localisation des activités innovantes et pertes à l’échange international

Following the Green Paper dealing with the entrepreneurship in Europe, the European Commission put forward the thesis that Europe suffers from an «entrepreneurship deficit» in comparison to the US. This paper presents a model dealing with the consequences of managers’ optimism and pessimism behaviour on the localisation of innovative activities and welfare. If one country is always better off under free trade, numerical simulations show that the other country and the world as a whole can be worse off. Trade liberalization can make worse the under-production or the over-production of the risky good and then increases the distortions that already hold in autarky.