Experimental evidence reveals that there is a strong willingness to trust and to act in bothpositively and negatively reciprocal ways. So far it is rarely analyzed whether these variablesof social cognition influence everyday decision making behavior. We focus on entrepreneurswho are permanently...

Many firms fail shortly after inception. Yet individuals continue starting businesses. Prewar economists such as Keynes invoked animal spirits and stressed psychological factors in their explanations of economic behavior. Using a large sample obtained from surveys conducted in 18 countries, we...

We use a sample of 18 countries to study what variables have a significant impact on an individual's decision to start a new business and classification and regression trees for an accurate interpretation of the data. Our results support existing literature suggesting the existence of strong...

The well-documented positive correlation between income risk and wealth was interpreted as evidence for high amounts of precautionary wealth in various studies. However, the large estimates emerged from pooling non-entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs without controlling for heterogeneity. This paper...

The amendment to the German Trade and Crafts Code in 2004 offers a natural experiment to asses the causal effects of this reform on the probabilities of being self-employed and transition into and out of self-employment, using cross-sections (2002-2006) of German microcensus data. This study...