Is entrepreneurial talent entirely innate or do people learn to become entrepreneurs? We extend Lucas's (1978) model of entrepreneurship to allow for the possibility that entrepreneurial talents may be acquired by watching other entrepreneurs in action. This model implies that areas with a...

In the large literature on firm performance, economists have given little attention to entrepreneurs. We use deaths of more than 500 entrepreneurs as a source of exogenous variation, and ask whether this variation can explain shifts in firm performance. Using longitudinal data, we find large and...

Using data that permit a distinction between flows of workers, directly measured, and job creation and destruction, again, directly measured, we develop employment and job flow statistics for a representative sample of French establishments for 1987 to 1990. Annual job creation can be...

There has been considerable controversy over the apparent slowdown in productivity growth in Britain and in other industrial countries over 1971-80 and the apparent speed up in at least British productivity growth over 1980-83. This paper throws light on these matters by means of an aggregate...

Since the early 1980s, the role and general perception of entrepreneurship and start-up activities has changed drastically. In this paper, we investigate what determines regions’ entrepreneurial behaviour and the impact of it on regional economic performance. We argue that economic knowledge...

The neoclassical model of the production function, as applied by Robert Solow to build the neoclassical model of growth, linked labour and capital to output. More recently, Romer and others have expanded the model to include measures of knowledge capital. In this Paper we introduce a new factor,...

This paper summarizes the study design of the Rural–Urban Migration in China and Indonesia (RUMiCI) project. We first discuss the overall distribution of migrants in Indonesia and the selection of survey cities. Next, we describe the process of identifying the migration status of each...

Prior to the last three decades, regular surveys on household income were rare or non-existent in many developed countries, making it difficult for economists to develop long-run series on income distribution. Using taxation statistics, which tend to be available over a longer time span, I...

Does Islamic terrorism have an effect on the general attitudes towards Muslim minorities? We use the murder of Theo van Gogh as an event study to address this question. Specifically, we use the hedonic-market model and test for an effect on listed house prices in neighbourhoods where more than...

This paper provides a structural empirical analysis of Dutch auctions of houseplants at the flower auction in Aalsmeer, the Netherlands. The data set is unique for Dutch auctions in the sense that it includes observations of all losing bids in an interval adjacent to the winning bid. The size of...