If one cluster increases local competitiveness, can politicians, by interlinking clusters, achieve an even better effect at the state level? To answer this question, the paper analyzes the Cluster Initiativeʺ introduced in 1999 by the Bavarian State Government. The purpose of the initiative was...

Models of political competition portray political candidates as seeking the support of the median voter to win elections by majority voting. In practice, political candidates seek supermajorities rather than majorities based on support of the median voter. We study the political benefits from...

This paper analyzes the effects of different energy transition paths on regional value added and on employment. We extend traditional input-output analysis by taking into account the scarcity of factors of production, and construct a dataset incorporating the regional dimension and specific...

Many countries support business start-ups to spur economic growth and reduce unemployment with different programmes. Evaluation studies of such programmes commonly rely on the conditional independence assumption (CIA), allowing a causal interpretation of the results only if all relevant...

We exploit Germany’s reunification to identify how school-age education affects entrepreneurial intentions. We look at university students in reunified Germany who were born before the Iron Curtain fell. During school age, all students in the West German control group received formal and...

A rapidly growing literature in industrial economics and regional economics uses data sets of individual firms or regional firm creation rates to answer the central question: What makes entrepreneurs? Which factors encourage some people to set up their own business and create jobs, and what...

New firm location decisions, relative to incumbents may be based on a choice between two types of advantages: natural advantages or those that arise from social embeddedness, the latter of which may particularly include knowledge spillovers. We analyze the relative importance of geographically...

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...

Today, start-ups often obtain financing via the Internet through many small contributions of non-sophisticated investors. Yet little is known about whether these start-ups can ultimately build enduring businesses. In this paper, we hand-collected data from 38 different equity crowdfunding (ECF)...