We use a sample of 18 countries to study what variables have a significant impact on an indi-vidual’s decision to start a new business and classification and regression trees for an accurate interpretation of the data. Our results support existing literature suggesting the existence of strong...

We examine how the gender of business-owners is related to the wages paid to female relative to male employees working in their firms. Using Finnish register data and employing firm fixed effects, we find that the gender pay gap is - starting from a gender pay gap of 11 to 12 percent - two to...

Entrepreneurs tend to be risk tolerant but is more risk tolerance always better? In a sample of about 2,100 small businesses, we find an inverted U-shaped relation between risk tolerance and profitability. This relationship holds in a simple bilateral regression and also when we control for a...

The economic literature has largely overlooked the importance of repeat migration. This paper studies repeat or circular migration as it is manifested by the frequency of exits of migrants living in Germany, and by the number of years being away from the host country using count data models....

The purpose of this paper is to obtain by combining two longitudinal perspectives a more detailed national picture of poverty in the Member States of the European Union, using the first four waves (1994 - 1997) of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). In addition to this detailed...

The empirical data presented here have been derived from a company survey which has been conducted in eight service sectors across the EU. From these eight sectors four sectors have been chosen for the present analysis. The criterion for selection was comparability with respect to market...

Germany experienced a unique rise in the level of self-employment in the first two decades following unification. Applying the non-linear Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition technique, we find that the main factors driving these changes in the overall level of self-employment are demographic...

We apply a multi-level approach to analyze simultaneously the effects of three groups of determinants on new firm formation: industry, location and change over time. The data is for West Germany and covers the 1983-97 period. Our analysis indicates that innovation activities and the...

We analyze whether start-up rates in different industries systematically change with business cycle variables. Using a unique data set at the industry level, we mostly find correlations that are consistent with counter-cyclical influences of the business cycle on entries in both innovative and...