We use a new database, the National Establishment Time Series (NETS), to revisit the debate about the role of small businesses in job creation. Birch (e.g., 1987) argued that small firms are the most important source of job creation in the U.S. economy. But Davis et al. (1996a) argued that this...

So far, there has been no data set which observes firm formations in Germany not only on a cross-sectional basis using one-time surveys, but continuously over a number of years. Therefore, the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), KfW Bankengruppe and Creditreform set up a panel study of...

Korean government has invested significant amount of resources through credit guarantee funds to promote SMEs survival, performance and R&D investment. This study attempts to identify determinants of provision of credit guarantees and estimate their effects on firms R&D expenditures. The...

The paper argues that networked firms are likely to have an advantage in securing external finance in countries with weak legal and judicial institutions since it helps financial institutions to minimize the underlying agency costs of lending. An analysis of recent BEEPS data from fifteen...

Small Business Administration (SBA) loans have long been one of the most significant policy interventions in the U.S. affecting firm behavior, but little is known about their outcomes. This paper estimates the effects on employment using a list of all SBA loans linked to annual data on all U.S....

The evidence suggests that relational contracting and legal rules play an important role in credit markets but on the basis of the prevailing field data it is difficult to pin down their causal impact. Here we show experimentally that relational incentives are a powerful causal determinant for...

Das deutsche Bildungssystem steht ungeachtet diverser Reformanstrengungen in der jüngeren Vergangenheit weiter vor großen Herausforderungen: Im internationalen Vergleich fehlt es an sozialer Chancengleichheit im Verlauf der Bildungskarrieren, und für eine "Bildungsnation" nehmen sich die...

This paper provides an evidence-based assessment of the current situation prevailing in the Greek market for skills and jobs. The synthesis of available skills intelligence for Greece, the country most severely affected by the global economic crisis of 2008, is crucial as it is currently faced...

This paper analyses the determinants and impact of labour market reforms in the European Union over the period of 2000-2011. The source of information on reforms is the LABREF database developed in DG ECFIN of the European Commission in cooperation with the Economic Policy Committee of the...

Italy's labour market suffers from a serious pathology, in addition to the increasing precariousness of the young workforce common to all EU member countries: flows from regular employment to non-employment are very often dead-ends. A vast number of young individuals who lose their job only a...