According to the German disability law, or Schwerbehindertengesetz, either six percent of all jobs in an establishment must be occupied by bisabled employees or the firm has to pay a penalty of DM 200 per month for every job under consideration. This note reports results from the first...

Using a large panel data set we investigate whether works councils act as a sand or grease in the operation of German firms. Stochastic production frontier analysis indicates that establishments with and without a works council do not exhibit significant differences in efficiency

Using a large recent representative sample of the German population this paper contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by empirically testing the hypothesis that young and small firms are hothouses for nascent entrepreneurs. The empirical estimation takes the rare events nature of...

Die Gründung eines Unternehmens ist ein Prozess, der damit beginnt, dass jemand Zeit und andere Ressourcen aufwendet, um die Entstehung einer neuen wirtschaftsaktiven Einheit "auf die Schiene zu setzen". Tut er dies (allein oder mit anderen) auf eigene Rechnung - und nicht als Teil seiner...

In a recent paper Edward Lazear proposed the "Jack-of-all-trades" view of entrepreneurship. Based on a coherent model of the choice between self-employment and paid employment he shows that having a background in a large number of different roles increases the probability of becoming an...