Offering unemployed individuals a subsidy to become self-employed is a widespread active labor market policy strategy. Previous studies have illustrated its high effectiveness to help participants escaping unemployment and improving their labor market prospects compared to other unemployed...

From an active labor market policy perspective, start-up subsidies for unemployed individuals are very effective in improving long-term labor market outcomes for participants. From a business perspective, however, the assessment of these public programs is less clear since they might attract...

Using a linked employer-employee dataset and taking the perspective of individuals rather than firms, this paper analyzes some effects of joining start-ups. We show that entrants in new firms differ from those joining incumbent firms, and we use a matching approach to compare a group of...

We analyze the effect of industry, region and time on new-business survival rates by means of a multi-dimensional approach. The data relate to West German districts in the 1983-2000 period. The survival chances of start-ups tend to be relatively low in industries characterized by a high minimum...