Agents compete to acquire a limited economic opportunity of uncertain profitability. Each agent decides how much he acquires public signals before making investment under fear of preemption. I show that equilibria have various levels of efficiency under mild competition. The effect of...

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...

Based on detailed information about the regional knowledge base, particularly about universities, we find that regional public research and education have a strong positive impact on new business formation in innovative industries but not in industries classified as non-innovative. Measures for...

We investigate the role played by different fields of academic knowledge and various types of higher education institutions in the emergence of innovative start-ups in a region. We show that education and research in the applied and natural sciences have the strongest effect on the emergence of...

This paper reviews the empirical evidence concerning the regional emergence of innovative new businesses. It is argued that analyses using aggregate data that focus on the regional level and do not account for career patterns of innovative founders are of limited value in guiding policy that is...

The value of social network analysis is critically dependent on the comprehensive and reliable identification of actors and their relationships. We compare regional knowledge networks based on different types of data sources, namely, co-patents, co-publications, and publicly subsidized...

We investigate the role of entrepreneurship culture and the historical knowledge base of a region on current levels of new business formation in innovative industries. The analysis is for German regions and covers the time period 1907-2014. We find a pronounced positive relationship between high...

This paper analyzes the early development of new establishments evaluating the role of spatial selection and agglomeration. The analysis shows a clear and strong selection of more productive new establishments into larger regions, regardless of the foundation type. While at the end of the...

This paper focuses on foreign language learning as human capital investment or consumption. We apply the human capital investment framework to foreign language learning and enlarge it by adding consumption motives. Based on a novel dataset collected from language course participants in 14...

During the past decade, equity crowdfunding (ECF) has emerged as an alternative funding channel for startup firms. In Germany, the Small Investor Protection Act became binding in July 2015, with the legislative goal to protect investors engaging in this new asset class. Since then, investors...