Drawing on representative household data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we examine the role of an early precursor of entrepreneurial development - parental role models - for the individual decision to become self-employed in the post-unified Germany. The findings suggest that the...

We investigate the persistence of levels of self-employment and new business formation in different time periods and under different framework conditions. The analysis shows that high levels of regional self-employment and new business formation tend to be persistent for periods as long as 80...

We investigate the effects of new business formation on employment change in German regions. A special focus is on the lag-structure of this effect and on differences between regions. The different phases of the effects of new business formation on regional development are relatively pronounced...

We investigate the impact of new business formation on regional employment. The main effects occur after a considerable time lag. Obviously, a large part of the effect is not due to job creation by the newcomers but rather is of indirect nature. This implies that a large part of the debate about...

Audretsch and Fritsch (2002) proposed two explanations for the mixed evidence regarding the relationship between new firm formation and regional development. Firstly, they found evidence for the existence of long time lags needed before the main effects of new firm formation on employment change...

We investigate regional differences in the level and the development of regional new business formation activity. There is a pronounced variance of start-up rates across the regions. The level of regional new firm formation is rather pathdependent so that changes are relatively small. The main...

In our analysis of the impact of new firm formation on regional employment change we identified considerable time lags. We investigated the structure and extent of these time lags by applying the Almon lag model and found that new firms can have both a positive and a negative effect on regional...

We investigate the effect of broad personality traits - the Big Five - on an individual's decision to become self-employed. In particular, we test an overall indicator of the entrepreneurial personality. Since we find that the level of selfemployment varies considerably across professions, we...

New firm location decisions, relative to incumbents may be based on a choice between two types of advantages: natural advantages or those that arise from social embeddedness, the latter of which may particularly include knowledge spillovers. We analyze the relative importance of geographically...

We investigate regional differences in the contribution of newly founded businesses to regional employment. This is labeled the direct employment effect of new businesses. The analysis is at the spatial level of West German planning regions for the period 1984-2002. We find rather pronounced...