Economists pay more and more attention to knowledge networks and drivers of their development. Consequently, a rich literature emerged analyzing factors explaining the emergence of intra-organizational links. Despite substantial work focusing on the dyad level, only little is known about how and...

The paper targets the relationship between growth of cooperation and later growth of innovation at the regional level. Patent data for German regions and eleven subsequent years is used to identify collaborative activity as well as the innovative output in each region. The results confirm to...

Envy and altruism have been studied extensively in adults. Here, we report data from an experiment studying envious and altruistic behavior in children. We study a sample of German school children aged seven to ten in a natural setting. We run two treatments. One treatment investigates envy, the...

Using a new dataset with detailed geographic information about licensing activities of the Max Planck Society, Germany's largest non-university public research organization, we analyze how the probability and magnitude of commercial success are affected by geographic distance between licensors...

It has become common within the literature of skill-biased technological change to look at technologies, as well as their impact on the demand for labor as homogeneous across industries. This paper challenges this view. Using a linked employer-employee panel of Germany differentiated by...

Entrepreneurs are found to have balanced skill sets and most have worked in small firms before starting their own business. In light of this, we compare the skill sets of employees working in businesses of different size to the skill sets of entrepreneurs using a rich data set on the applied...

We investigate the effect of broad personality traits' - the Big Five - on an individua's decision to become self-employed. In particular, we test an overall indicator of the entrepreneurial personality. Since we find that the level of self-employment varies considerably across professions, we...

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 analyze the spatial diffusion of knowledge in laser technology in West Germany from 1960, when this technology began, until 2005. Laser technology research has been nearly exclusively conducted in regions that are home to a university with a physics or electrical engineering department, an...

We compare two leading regional innovation systems (RIS) in East Germany with two RIS in West Germany of about the same size and internal settlement structure. Our analyses show that differences in the performance between the regions cannot easily be related to the structural properties of the...