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...

This paper endeavours to illustrate the consequences of a credit squeeze by inserting a standard model of retail banks into some familiar macroeconomic models. Some possible policy conclusions are drawn about the benefits of incentives to increase lending at these times, and to reduce it in much...

This overview of transaction cost economics is organized around the "Carnegie Triple" – be disciplined; be interdisciplinary; have an active mind. The first of these urges those who would open up the black box of economic organization to do so in a modest, slow, molecular, definitive way, with...

Since the year 2000, innovation and the path towards a “knowledge-based” economy have become prominent concepts in the European policy sphere. Although fostered by the goal of the innovationoriented Lisbon Strategy, it remains questionable in how far the situation of being the “most...

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...

This paper investigates whether proximity to universities matters for corporate patenting in Chinese provinces. The investigation is based on estimating regional knowledge production functions using a Chinese provincial dataset for the years from 2000 to 2008. Geographic proximity of companies...

In this paper, we present a standard quality ladders endogenous growth model with one significant new assumption, that it takes time for firms to learn how to export. We show that this model without Melitz-type assumptions can account for all the evidence that the Melitz (2003) model was...

It is striking that by far the lion’s share of empirical studies on the impact of outsourcing on firms considers industrialized countries. However, outsourcing by firms from emerging economies is far from negligible and growing. This paper investigates the link between outsourcing and...

This paper constructs a two-sector unified growth model that explains the timing and the inevitability of an industrial revolution through entrepreneurs' role for the accumulation of useful knowledge. While learning-by-doing in agriculture eventually allows the preindustrial economy to leave its...