We investigate the interdependence of debt financing and R&D activities of young firms. Using micro-level data of the KfW/ZEW Start-up Panel, our estimation results show that firm characteristics are more important than personal characteristics of the founders for explaining young firms'...

Established firms often face significant obstacles to innovation. As a solution, it has been suggested to form corporate ventures. Based on a sample of corporate and independent ventures in German manufacturing, we show that corporate ventures are more innovative than the control group, i.e. the...

Existing data sets on firm formations in Germany suffer from various shortcomings that prohibit sound analyses of new firms’ development over time. Therefore, the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), KfW Bankengruppe and Creditreform are cooperating to form a start-up panel for...

The traditional argument that shorter product cycles favor trade secret over patenting is reviewed. A game theoretic model provides an argument that shorter product cycles can induce firms to file more patent applications. The firms may be trapped in a prisoners' dilemma where all firms would...

One of the most conspicuous features of mergers is that they come in waves that are correlated with increases in share prices and price/earnings ratios. We use a natural way to discriminate between pure stock market influences on firm decisions and other influences by examining merger patterns...

Although blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies have grown in popularity over the past years, there does not seem to be a consensus if they bring any value to economic interactions. In this paper, I argue that a fundamental value the blockchain provides is commitment. I develop a model of an...

Recent Internet technologies and web-based applications, such as social software, are being increasingly applied in firms. Social software can be employed for knowledge management and for external communication enabling access to internal and external knowledge. Knowledge in turn constitutes one...

The cost and revenue earnings potential of alternative power generation sources has shifted considerably in recent years. Here we introduce the concept of Levelized Profit Margins (LPM) to capture the changing unit economics of both intermittent and dispatchable generation technologies. We apply...

The pace of the global decarbonization process is widely believed to hinge on the rate of cost improvements for clean energy technologies, in particular renewable power and energy storage. This paper adopts the classical learning-by-doing framework of Wright (1936), which predicts that cost will...

The paper aims at testing Florida's concept of the Creative Class using panel data for 323 West German regions for the time period 1975-2004. Applying a dynamic system approach based on GMM, we find that the local concentration of the Creative Class has predictive power for the economic...