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...

Experimental evidence reveals that there is a strong willingness to trust and to act in both positively and negatively reciprocal ways. So far it is rarely analyzed whether these variables of social cognition influence everyday decision making behavior. We focus on entrepreneurs who are...

German universities are regarded as being under-financed, inefficient, and performing below average if compared to universities in other European countries and the US. Starting in the 1990s, several German federal states implemented reforms to improve this situation. An important part of these...

This paper investigates whether self-employed households use consumer loans – in particular instalment loans and overdrafts – to finance business activities. Controlling for financial and non-financial household variables we show that self-employed households particularly use personal...

Using a unique dataset for Germany that links individual longitudinal data from the GSOEP to regional data from the federal employment agency and data of real estate prices, we evaluate the impact of neighborhood unemployment on individual employment prospects. The panel setup and richness of...

Compulsory military service typically drafts young men when they are at the height of their learning ability. Thus, it can be expected to depress the demand for higher education since skill atrophy and the delayed entry into the civilian labor market reduce the returns to human-capital...

This paper combines individual-level data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) with economic and demographic postcode-level data from administrative records to analyze the effects of immigration on wages and unemployment probabilities of high- and low-skilled natives. Employing an...

Empirical evidence on the degree of business-tax shifting to employees via the wage level is highly controversial and rare. It remains open to which extent the tax burden is shifted, whether there are differences for tax increases and decreases, or whether there exists some treatment...

This study analyses employers' support for the introduction of industry-specific minimum wages as a cost-raising strategy in order to deter market entry. Using a unique data set consisting of 800 firms in the German service sector, we find some evidence that high-productivity employers support...