The building blocks of our model are bounded-rational actors with specific sets of endowments: ’entrepreneurial spirit’, human capital and venture capital. The entrepreneurial behavior to found a firm is triggered by the individuals’ endowments, their social network and the evaluation of...

This study analyzes the impact of entrepreneurship education at universities on the intentions of students to become entrepreneurs or self-employed in the short-term (immediately after graduation) and in the long-term (five years after graduation). A difference-in-differences approach is applied...

The paper reviews the approaches that have been followed for analyzing the effect of new business formation on regional development. It begins with an outline of how start-ups may affect regional development. In dealing with different ways of empirically assessing these effects, I particularly...

This paper summarizes interviews from 1998 with 590 individuals trying to create a business centered around five questions: 'Who are you?', 'What are you trying to accomplish?', 'What have you and others put into the business?', 'What have you accomplished?', 'What remains to be done?' There is...

Many firms fail shortly after inception. Yet individuals continue starting businesses. Prewar economists such as Keynes invoked animal spirits and stressed psychological factors in their explanations of economic behavior. Using a large sample obtained from surveys conducted in 18 countries, we...

We investigate the workforce heterogeneity of startups with respect to education, age and wages. Our explorative study uses data on the population of 1,614 Danish firms founded in 1998. We track these firms until 2001 which enables us to analyze changes in workforce composition over time. Such a...

In new new international trade theory, whether firms export or not are determined by their productivity. These models assume that firms enter a market to find their productivity levels revealed to them as in a lottery. In this paper we propose an alternative way to model whether firms export or...

Based on a three equations model for initial firm size, survival and firm growth we estimate firm-specific transition probabilities between size classes of the firm size distribution. This allows to analyze counterfactual scenarios that assess the impact of changes in exogenous variables on the...

Resource-rich countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have the highest youth unemployment rate in the world. While other parts of the world are experiencing an increasing trend in new firms' formation as a potential solution for their unemployment problem, the MENA region has the...

This paper attempts to identify and evaluate the main determinants of venture capital (VC). We develop a theoretical model where macroeconomic conditions, technological opportunity, and the entrepreneurial environment affect the demand and supply of VC. The quantitative results, based on a panel...