This paper, which is one of the first to estimate productivity in retail electricity for a European country after liberalisation, analyses the effect of ownership and governance structure by using a unique dataset of German electricity retailers from 2003 to 2012. An innovative service...

A strong private equity market is a cornerstone for commercialization and innovation in modern economies. However, substantial differences exist in the relative amounts raised and invested in private equity across European countries. We investigate the macro-determinants of private equity...

Self-efficacy reflects the self-belief that one can persistently perform difficult and novel tasks while coping with adversity. As such beliefs reflect how individuals behave, think, and act, they are key for successful entrepreneurial activities. While existing literature mainly analyzes the...

When unemployed persons go into business, they often are characterized as necessity entrepreneurs, because push factors, namely their unemployment, likely prompted their decision. In contrast to this, business founders who have been previously employed represent opportunity entrepreneurs because...

This paper investigates the impact of new firms' quality on the magnitude of their employment effects. Our results clearly show that the quality of start-ups, measured by their affiliation with sectors and innovative industries, strongly influences the direct and the overall employment...

This paper reviews the current state of knowledge about the effect of new business formation on regional development. After a brief sketch of the origins of research on this issue, the main results of different lines of inquiry are discussed. Main issues are the development of start-up cohorts,...

We provide, for the first time, comparative evidence of the impact of various types of extreme events - natural disasters, terrorism, and violent conflicts - on the perceptions of entrepreneurs concerning some key entrepreneurial issues - such as fear of failure in starting a business venture,...

We use a neoclassical production function to analyze the effects of knowledge spillovers via entrepreneurship on economic performance of 337 German districts. To take the spatial dependence structure of the data into account, we estimate a spatial Durbin model. We highlight the importance of the...

The amendment to the German Trade and Crafts Code in 2004 offers a natural experiment to asses the causal effects of this reform on the probabilities of being self-employed and transition into and out of self-employment, using cross-sections (2002-2006) of German microcensus data. This study...

This paper systematically investigates whether different kinds of personality characteristics influence entrepreneurial development. On the basis of a large, representative household panel survey, we examine the extent to which the Big Five traits and further personality characteristics, which...