We empirically investigate the relationship between a country's economic complexity and the diversity in the birthplaces of its immigrants. Our cross-country analysis suggests that birthplace diversity is strongly and positively associated with economic complexity. This holds particularly for...

Religious divisions have long played a primary role in major conflicts throughout much of the world. Intergroup contact may increase trust between members of different religions. However, evidence on how inter-religious contact affects individuals’ behavior towards one another is scarce. We...

This study investigates boards of (non-executive) directors and whether employee representation has a positive effect on gender diversity on boards. We exploit rich, newly assembled board–director matched panel data for Norway and Germany, which contain unique information on whether a director...

The last decade has seen a growing interest among economists on the effect of diversity on the provision of social goods and the stock of social capital. Indeed, in the workplace, cooperation, trust, and other social goods may be important elements of the smooth functioning of an office, but...

This paper considers a two sectors heterogeneous firms model where firms' specific production technology and capital intensity are endogenously determined through business dynamics. It shows that a shock to the relative price of investment goods is followed by the entrance of new firms...

Are entrepreneurs liquidity constraint? Using quasi-random housing wealth variation resulting from communist era decisions, we argue yes, as we find that wealthier East Germans are more likely to become self-employed after reunification. In the literature, no such strong relationship was found...

Various forms of social learning and network effects are at work on crowdfunding platforms, giving rise to informational and payoff externalities. We use novel entrepreneur-backer data to study how these externalities shape funding dynamics, within and across projects. We find that backers...

Venture capital (VC) and growth are examined both empirically and theoretically. Empirically, VC-backed startups have higher early growth rates and initial patent quality than non-VC-backed ones. VC-backing increases a startup's likelihood of reaching the right tails of the firm size and...

We present new empirical evidence on the distribution of earnings, income and wealth among entrepreneurs in Germany. We document that both earnings and income are more concentrated among entrepreneurs than among workers and describe a large-scale overlapping-generations model that can replicate...