Increasing the participation of women in top-level corporate boards is high on the agenda of policymakers. Yet, we know little about director appointment dynamics and the drivers and impediments of women appointments. This study builds on organizational and group-level behavior theories and...

This paper shows that the provision of consumer rights can decrease welfare when some consumers remain ignorant of these rights. We find that consumers uninformed about a mandated warranty demand excessively safe products in some circumstances. In other circumstances, uninformed consumers buy...

We analyze a monopolist who offers different variants of a possibly dangerous product to heterogeneous customers. Product variants are distinguished by different safety attributes. Customers choose product usage which co- determines expected harm. We find that, even with customers being...

A widespread approach to measuring the innovative capacity of companies, sectors, and regions is the analysis of patents and trademarks or the use of surveys. In emerging digital technologies this approach may, however, not be sufficient for mapping technology diffusion. This applies to...

Big Data (BD) is becoming widely available and manageable. This raises the question of whether Big Data Analytics (BDA) in companies leads to better decision-making andhence performance. Based on a large, representative set of start-ups in Germany, we study the adoption of BDA among small and...

New business formation is a key driver of regional transformation and development. While we know that a region’s attractiveness for new businesses depends on its resources, infrastructure, and human capital, we know little about the role of local business networks in promoting or impeding the...

While many digital technologies provide opportunities for creating business models with an impact on sustainability, some technologies, especially blockchain applications, are often criticized for harming the environment, e.g. due to high energy demand. In our study, we present a novel approach...

Green start-ups play a vital role in the needed transition towards more environmentally sustainable economies. Yet our understanding of why some founders start green ventures and others do not remains incomplete. We build on the cognitive and decision-making perspectives on start-ups...

Start-up subsidies play an important role in supporting start-up innovation and performance. However, what characteristics help and hinder start-ups to seek start-up subsidies remains unclear. We study whether and how founder personality, as captured by the big five personality traits and...

The availability of social media data is growing and represents a new data source for economic research. This paper presents a detailed study on the use of data from a careeroriented social networking platform for measuring employee flows and employer networks. The employment data are exported...