The purpose of this paper is to introduce a series of articles on the linksbetween innovation, the evolution of industry and employment. These relationsprovide the building blocks of a new industrial policy. The articles areincluded in Innovation, Industry Evolution and Employment published by...

The purpose of this paper is to suggest that a fundamental shift in Europe, along with the other OECD countries, is taking place. This shift is from the managed economy to the entrepreneurial economy. While politicians and policy makers have made a plea for guidance in the era of...

Despite the pervasive phenomenon of scale economies the majority of firms hasalways been small firms. The emergence of small firms as a means of economic development on both sides of the Atlantic has been one of the major new topics of economic policy since the 1980s. This has drawn renewed...

A large literature has emerged focusing on the post-entry performance of firms and, in particular, on thelinks between firm growth, survival, size and age. While these studies have resulted in findings that aresufficiently consistent as to constitute Stylized Facts, virtually all of these...

The Dutch drinking water sector experienced two drastic changes over the last 10 years. Firstly, in 1997, the sector association started with a voluntary benchmarking aimed to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the sector. Secondly, merger activity arose. This paper develops a tailored...

We model entrepreneurship and the emergence of firms as a result of simultaneous bidding for labor services among heterogeneousagents. Unique to our approach is that occupational choices, jobmatching and organizational forms are determined simultaneously, sothat the opportunity costs of...

We develop a new perspective on the boundary of the firm that is consistent with the empirical observation that the share of entrepreneurs first decreases and then increases in the course of economic development. Existing theory based on transaction costs is difficult to relate to these...

In this laboratory experiment we study the use of strategic ignorance to delegate real authority within a firm. A worker can gather information on investment projects, while a manager makes the implementation decision. The manager can monitor the worker. This allows her to better exploit the...

Promoting investments in energy saving technologies is an important means forachieving environmental goals. Unfortunately, the empirical evidence on successconditions of policies isscarce. Based on a survey among Dutch firms, this paper sets out to identify thefactors that determine the...

This paper examines the small world hypothesis. The first part of the paper presents empirical evidence on the evolution of a particular world: the world of journal publishing economists during the period 1970-2000. We find that in the 1970's the world of economics was a collection of islands....