We investigate the interdependence of debt financing and R&D activities of young firms. Using micro-level data of the KfW/ZEW Start-up Panel, our estimation results show that firm characteristics are more important than personal characteristics of the founders for explaining young firms'...

Society's demands for individual and corporate social responsibility as an alternative response to market and distributive failures are becoming increasingly prominent. We first draw on recent developments in the psychology and economics of prosocial behavior to shed light on this trend, which...

Starting a firm with expansive potential is an option for educated and high-skilled workers. This option serves as an insurance against unemployment caused by labor market frictions and hence increases the incentives for education. We show within a matching model that reducing the start-up costs...

We study entrepreneurs' start-up financing from banks and local financiers. An informal network, whose membership cannot be observed by outsiders, conveys the good signals it gets about the hidden types of network entrepreneurs to local financiers, which are then reflected in different loan...

Milton Friedman has famously claimed that the responsibility of a manager who is not the owner of a firm is "to conduct the business in accordance with their [the shareholders'] desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible." In this paper we argue that when contracts are...

This paper uses a quasi-experimental framework provided by recent changes in Russian corporate law to study the effect of investor protection on the value of shares. The legal change analyzed involves the empowerment of preferred (non-voting) shareholders to veto unfavorable changes in their...

This paper examines major forces that have decoupled economic and business prosperity from social prosperity and explores how recoupling can be promoted. Economists have specified well-known conditions under which free market enterprise with shareholder value maximization is efficient. These...

Society's demands for individual and corporate social responsibility as an alternative response to market and distributive failures are becoming increasingly prominent. We first draw on recent developments in the "psychology and economics" of prosocial behavior to shed light on this trend, which...

Using a large recent representative sample of the German population this paper contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by empirically testing the hypothesis that young and small firms are hothouses for nascent entrepreneurs. The empirical estimation takes the rare events nature of...