External finance is central for nascent entrepreneurs, people in the process of starting new ventures. We argue that nascent entrepreneurs use patents and prototypes in order to signal their ability to appropriate the returns from their innovation as well as the project's feasibility. Our...

Existing theories of a firm’s optimal capital structure seem to fail in explaining why many healthy and profitable firms rely heavily on equity financing, even though benefits associated with debt (like tax shields) appear to be high and the bankruptcy risk low. This holds in particular for...

The paper looks at the characteristics of Italian non-financial firms that accessed the bond market for the first time between 2002 and 2013. The results of logit estimations indicate that first-time bond issuers are significantly larger and more frequently listed on the stock exchange than...

The paper describes the characteristics of the market for private placements and discusses the necessary conditions for their uptake in Europe. A private placement is a method of financing used mainly by medium-sized companies which, unable to access the public bond market, turn to one or more...

We develop a theory of innovation for entry and sale into oligopoly, and show that inventions of higher quality are more likely to be sold (or licensed) to an incumbent due to strategic product market effects on the sales price. Such preemptive acquisitions by incumbents are shown to stimulate...

The relationship between innovation and firm survival is analyzed for the population of German laser source producers from the beginning of the industry until 2005. Innovation effort is approximated by the generation of high quality patents in laser sources technology (IPC H01S) and by having...

This study analyzes the impact of entrepreneurship education at universities on the intentions of students to become entrepreneurs or self-employed in the short-term (immediately after graduation) and in the long-term (five years after graduation). A difference-in-differences approach is applied...

We investigate the effects that regional start-up activity has on employment in new and in incumbent businesses. The analysis is performed for West German regions over the 1987-2002 period. It shows that the effects of new businesses on employment in the incumbents are significantly positive and...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the existence of cross-level moderating effects between national appropriability conditions, individual level predictors and entrepreneurial growth aspirations. We test a multi-level model that connects the determinants of strategic resource allocation...

The present paper sheds light on how growth of young firms is affected by expansive strategies and the socioeconomic heritage of their main actors. "Socioeconomic heritage" has to do with socialization, prior socioeconomic circumstances, and regional growth conditions; the term is elaborated...