This paper investigates the relevance of government purchasing behavior for innovation-based economic growth. We construct a parsimonious Schumpeterian growth model in which demand from the public sphere can effectively alter the economy's rate of technological change. We incorporate results of...

Recent empirical contributions emphasize the importance of (potential) market size for the development of new pharmaceuticals. At the same time many scholars point out the importance of of scientific advances for the industry's R&D activities. Against this background I analyze the relationship...

This paper investigates the relationship between job satisfaction and age for self-employed persons as compared to paid employees. While, on average, there are higher levels of job satisfaction in self-employment as compared to paid employment, we find that an individual's age is an important...

We propose an extension of the standard occupational choice model to analyze the life satisfaction of senior entrepreneurs as compared to paid employees and particularly retirees in Germany. The analysis identifies income and health status as main factors that shape the relationship between...

Innovations in information- and telecommunication technology render the proximity requirement between business partners obsolete and make business service outsourcing via cross-border trade more feasible. Although the (service-led) growth prospects have been widely discussed, evidence at the...

We formulate a model that explicitly separates two functions in the innovation process: The introduction of new goods and the quality improvement of existing goods. While the latter is performed by the corporate R&D sector, the first is performed by entrepreneurs. We show that in a three sector...

The issue of poverty traps is assessed using quantile regression. For that an augmentation of the usual convergence regressions by quadratic and cubic terms is used with emphasis on curve fitting rather than parameter estimation. The results show that the generic mechanism leading to poverty...

In economic development, long-run structural change among the three main sectors of an economy follows a typical pattern with the primary sector (agriculture, mining) first dominating, followed by the secondary sector (manufacturing) and finally by the tertiary sector (services) in terms of...

An AIDS epidemic threatens Ethiopia with a long wave of premature adult mortality, and thus with an enduring setback to capital formation and economic growth. The authors develop a two-sector model with three overlapping generations and intersectorally mobile labor, in which young adults...

This paper addresses the question of whether government procurement can work as a de facto innovation policy tool. We develop an endogenous growth model with quality-improving in-novation that incorporates industries with heterogeneous innovation sizes. Government de-mand in high-tech industries...