The influence of industrial structure, more specifically of business ownership, is investigated on the level of unemployment in Japan. The question is to what extent business ownership, i.e., entrepreneurship, can reduce the level of unemployment. It will be concluded that Japan is hardly an...

This paper argues that the conventional definition of the elasticity of complementarity is not well suited to deal with the case of increasing returns. It proposes a slightly different formula, that uses a distance function formulation instead of a production function. The proposed definition...

This paper focuses on a new concern in the small firm’s literature, namely what makes a small firm stay in business for a long time. It reflects a change in economic policy, away from an emphasis on volume of start-ups to an emphasis on quality of start-ups. The basic hypothesis is that...

This paper conducts the first general equilibrium analysis of the role of entry, exit and profits in industry dynamics. The benefit of our model is twofold. First, to discriminate between entrants’ role of performing the entrepreneurial function of creating disequilibrium and the conventional...

In the present paper we address the relationship between the extentof business ownership (self-employment) and economic development. We will focusupon three issues. First, how is the equilibrium rate of business ownershiprelated to the stage of economic development? Second, what is the speed...

This paper discusses the design, implementation and use of standards from the perspective of transaction costs economics. A proper design and implementation of standards may lead to a considerable reduction of transaction costs, which enhances trade and, consequently, economic welfare. A major...

We apply the stochastic evolutionary approach of equilibrium selection tomacroeconomic models in which a complementarity at the macro level ispresent. These models often exhibit multiple Pareto-ranked Nash equilibria,and the best response-correspondence of an individual increases with ameasure...

See also F.A.G. den Butter, R. Hayat (2013), Trade between China and the Netherlands: a case study of trade in tasks, <I>Journal of Chinese Economic and Foreign Trade Studies</I>, 6(3), 178-191. <P> During the last decades, the growth of trade between China and the Netherlands has been larger than the...</p></i>

A central question in strategic management is why some firms perform better than others. One approach to addressing this question empirically is to decompose the variance in firm-level profitability into firm, industry, location, and year components. Although it is well established that data...

This discussion paper resulted in an article in <I>Management Science</I>. Volume 59 issue 7, pages 1514-1528.<P> This paper reports on a field experiment conducted to estimate the impact of the share of women in business teams on their performance. Teams consisting of undergraduate students in business...</p></i>