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...

The paper reviews the approaches that have been followed for analyzing the effect of new business formation on regional development. It begins with an outline of how start-ups may affect regional development. In dealing with different ways of empirically assessing these effects, I particularly...

What makes entrepreneurs different? Using a cross-country dataset, this paper explores essential parts of the value system of entrepreneurs in Western European countries by comparing value items of the self-employed to that of the non-self-employed. The self-employed rate values higher that aim...

We investigate regional differences in the contribution of newly founded businesses to regional employment. This is labeled the direct employment effect of new businesses. The analysis is at the spatial level of West German planning regions for the period 1984-2002. We find rather pronounced...

External finance is central for nascent entrepreneurs, people in the process of starting new ventures. We argue that nascent entrepreneurs use patents and prototypes in order to signal their ability to appropriate the returns from their innovation as well as the project´s feasibility. Our...

We use longitudinal data over a decade on start-ups and employment in Swedish regions and analyze the effect of start-ups on subsequent employment growth. We extend previous analyses by examining the influence of regional start-ups in a sector on regional employment growth in the same sector and...

Recent empirical research has found that the effect of new business formation on employment emerges over a period of about ten years and has identified a 'wave' pattern of these effects. In this study, we decompose the overall contribution of new business formation on employment change into...

We investigate the effects that new business formation has on employment in incumbent firms and compare it to the development in the start-ups. The analysis is performed for West German regions over the 1984-2002 period. It shows that the employment effects of new businesses on the incumbents...