The Environmental Liability Act (Umwelthaftungsgesetz) enacted January 1, 1991 is claimed to have substantially tightened the environmental liability regime in Germany. The economic consequences of the amendment of the German environmental liability legislation initiated by the Sandoz accident...

Die Bedeutung von Risikokapital für innovative Industrien wurde in der Literatur vielfach hervorgehoben. Der vorliegende Beitrag stellt die Entwicklungen des deutschen Risikokapitalmarktes für Biotechnologie im Zeitraum 1995-2005 dar und geht auf regionale Unterschiede ein. Der...

In this paper we use plant level data on the start-up size of new plant entries and detailed information on the grants received by such plants in order to investigate whether grant receipt encourages plants to start-up with more employment than without support. The data relate to manufacturing...

Although there is a large and rapidly growing literature on the determinants of regional variation in new firm formation, relatively little is known about the interrelation between the characteristics of start-up firms and urban structure. It is only recently that scholars of urban economics...

Does regional unemployment increase or rather decrease entrepreneurial activity? Although this question has been hotly debated among researchers for decades the answers yielded so far are ambiguous and inconclusive. The paper proposes an innovative approach that takes not only interregional...

This paper substantiates the debate following Richard Florida’s suggestion to measure regional human capital by creative occupations rather than education. Consistent with Florida’s notion of creativity, it suggests a microfoundation that relates creativity to workers’ cognitive and...

This paper sets up an economic geography model to show the endogenous forces that determine the degree of industry concentration in the course of economic development. The model includes centrifugal forces, such as home market effects and access to intermediate suppliers, and centripetal forces,...

Urban concentration differs across countries. One determinant of these differences is economic development, which first increases and subsequently decreases urban concentration. I condition the degree of urban concentration on the potential of countries to develop a balanced urban system. These...