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 projectś feasibility. Our...

Crowdinvesting emerged recently as an alternative way of funding for start-up projects. Our dataset consists of all pledges made at Companisto, one of the largest crowdinvesting platforms in Europe. Using cluster analysis based on individual investment histories, we find that crowdinvestors...

We investigate whether the supply of venture capital (VC) is driven by spatial proximity between a VC company and the portfolio firm. Our analysis is based on information about VC investments in Germany between 2004 and 2009. We find that possible problems caused by the geographic distance to a...

Anecdotal evidence suggests that journalists and bureaucrats in some countries are killed when they try to blow the whistle on corruption. We demonstrate in a simple game-theoretical model how murders can serve as an enforcement mechanism of corrupt deals under certain regime assumptions....

For our experiment on corruption, we designed a coordination game to model the influence of risk attitudes, beliefs, and information on behavioral choices and determined the equilibria. We observed that the participants' risk attitudes failed to explain their choices between corrupt and...

A group of actors, individuals or firms, can engage in collectively providing projects which may be costly or generating revenues and which may benefit some and harm others. Based on requirements of procedural fairness (Güth and Kliemt, 2013), we derive a bidding mechanism determining...

Green innovations aim to improve and reduce the environmental impact of economic activities. Thus far, research focus on the positive trajectories of green transition. Recent studies focus also on the speed of transition and on its effects on economic outcomes. Continuing in this direction we...

This survey reviews the theoretical literature on high impact entrepreneurship. The survey is guided in part by the recent classification changes at the Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) regarding entrepreneurship. The board voted to create a new classification code, L26, for...

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...

We analyze different types of effects that new businesses may have on regional employment. We introduce different measures for employment change by separating employment change in incumbent businesses and employment change in new businesses. There are pronounced differences between regions with...