Motivated by differences in new-firm survival across regions, this paper explores the impact of regional human capital on new-firm survival rates. New-firm survival is interpreted through formation rates of surviving versus closed firms in the service sector. By incorporating knowledge...

Analyzing a cross-country panel of 16 OECD countries from 2002 to 2005, we find that higher unemployment benefits crowd out nascent entrepreneurial activity. Our results hold regardless of entrepreneurial motivation (necessity or opportunity) and entrepreneurial type (imitative or innovative).

We study a unique sample of 1,547 nascent entrepreneurs in Germany and analyze which factors are associated with their start-up satisfaction. Our results identify a group of nascent entrepreneurs that “cannot get satisfaction†with their start-up because they did not choose to become...

The study provides theoretical insights and empirical evidence on the emergence of different types and degrees of entrepreneurial innovativeness. The results suggest that entrepreneurial innovativeness depends both on individual factors and on the environment in which the individual lives. In...

Although human capital externalities are a key variable in theories of economic growth, there has been little investigation of the mechanism by which these externalities are realized. We examine the relationship between the local levels of human capital and firm formation rates and find that...

Recent theories of economic growth have stressed the role of externalities in generating growth. Using data from the Census Bureau that tracks all employers in the whole U.S. private sector economy, we examine the impact of these externalities, as measured by entrepreneurial activity, on...

An important new literature on gross employment flows has produced a great outpouring of stylized facts. In this paper we examine one aspect of this literature through the lens of dynamic models and theories of industrial evolution. We extend the Davis and Haltiwanger methodology for analysis of...

We are currently investigating genetic influences on self-employment in an international research consortium using genome-wide association studies (GWAS). By meta-analysing results from numerous independent samples we address identification issues arising from multiple testing. To our knowledge,...