Using unique recently released nationally representative high-quality longitudinal enterprise-level data for Germany, this paper presents the first comprehensive evidence on the relationship between exports and profitability. It documents that the positive profitability differential of exporters...

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...

Folklore has it that the comparatively low proportion of self-employed in Germany in in part due to a habit that might be termed "stigmatisation of failure": taking a second chance to build one's own firm after failing as a self-employed person is said to be much more difficult here than in...