The novelty of our model is to combine models of collective action on networks with models of social learning. Agents are connected according to an undirected graph, the social network, and have the choice between two actions: either to adopt a new behavior or technology or stay with the default...

This paper studies the diffusion of multiple, related technologies among firms. The results suggest an endogenous acceleration mechanism of technology adoption: The more advanced a firm is in using a particular set of technologies, the more likely it is to adopt additional, related technologies....

This paper seeks to identify relationships between human capital and cultural capital, in the context of local labour market productivity. The key constituents of human capital, identified in the literature, are jointly examined in a close-to-reality-model. The main advantage of our model of...

Estimates of the effect of education on GDP (the social return) have been hard to reconcile with micro evidence on the private return to schooling. We present a simple explanation combining two ideas: imperfect substitution and endogenous skill-biased technological progress and use cross-country...

Donor agencies and recipient governments want to assess the effectiveness of aid-supported sector policies. Unfortunately, existing methods for impact evaluation are designed for the evaluation of homogeneous interventions (‘projects’) where those with and without ‘treatment’ can be...

Accepted for publication in the <I>Journal of Development Economics</I>.<P> This paper introduces the Small World model (Watts and Strogatz, Nature, 1998) into the theory of economic growth and investigates how increasing economic integration affects firm size and efficiency, norm enforcement, and...</p></i>

We develop a new perspective on the boundary of the firm that is consistent with the empirical observation that the share of entrepreneurs first decreases and then increases in the course of economic development. Existing theory based on transaction costs is difficult to relate to these...

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 revisits the two-equation model of Carree, van Stel, Thurik and Wennekers (2002) where deviations from the ‘equilibrium’ rate of business ownership play a central role determining both the growth of business ownership and that of economic development. Two extensions of the...

Total factor productivity of twenty OECD countries for a recent period (1971-2002) is explained using six different models based on the established literature. Traditionally, entrepreneurship is not dealt with in these models. In the present paper it is shown that – when this variable is added...