We investigate how personal income taxes affect the portfolio share of personal wealth that entrepreneurs invest in their own business. In a reformulation of the standard portfolio choice model that allows for underreporting of private business income to tax authorities, we show that a fall in...

Experimental evidence reveals that there is a strong willingness to trust and to act in both positively and negatively reciprocal ways. So far it is rarely analyzed whether these variables of social cognition influence everyday decision making behavior. We focus on entrepreneurs who are...

A personal bankruptcy law that allows for a "fresh start" after bankruptcy reduces the individual risk involved in entrepreneurial activity. On the other hand, as risk shifts to creditors who recover less of their credit after a debtor's bankruptcy, lenders may charge higher interest rates or...

This paper systematically investigates whether different kinds of personality characteristics influence entrepreneurial development. On the basis of a large, representative household panel survey, we examine the extent to which the Big Five traits and further personality characteristics, which...

Folklore has it that the comparatively low proportion of self-employed in Germany is in part due to a habit that might be termed 'stigmatisation of failure': taking a second chance to build one's own firm after failing as a self-employed is said to be much more difficult here than in other...

In a sharp break with past German research, some recent estimates have suggested that plants with work councils have 25 to 30 per cent higher productivity than their works-councilfree counterparts. Such findings can only serve to buttress the strong theoretical and policy interest in the German...

In a survey published in the British Journal of Industrial Relations, Frege (2002) evaluates research on the German works council from the perspective of several disciplines, including economics. Ultimately, she concludes that economic analysis of the works council has reached a ?dead end?. The...

In a recent paper Edward Lazear proposed the jack-of-all-trades view of entrepreneurship. Based on a coherent model of the choice between self-employment and paid employment he shows that having a background in a large number of different roles increases the probability of becoming an...

Using a large recent representative sample of the German population this paper contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by empirically testing the hypothesis that young and small firms are hothouses for nascent entrepreneurs. The empirical estimation takes the rare events nature of...