While research concerning the fundamental connection between financial crises and international trade, at first appearance, provides conclusive results, it displays two specific methodological biases by ignoring income effects: first, crisis influence is underestimated; second, crisis dynamics do...

Based on a large, representative German household panel, we investigate to what extent the personality of individuals influences the entry decision into and the exit decision from self-employment. We reveal that some traits, such as openness to experience, extraversion, and risk tolerance affect...

L2, L26, O3, O4. </AbstractSection> Copyright Herrmann and Kritikos; licensee Springer. 2013

Unregulated credit markets will not finance the majority of unemployed people when they aim to receive a loan for running their own business. In the US an optimal policy mix reduces the entry barriers so that the most promising self-employment business plans are self-selected and financed via a...

We analyze the sources of the rise in the levels of self-employment in Germany since reunification by applying the non-linear Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition technique. This analysis is performed separately for East and West Germany in order to account for the East German recovery of...

"The promotion of business start-ups by formerly unemployed individuals has become an increasingly important instrument of German active labour market policy (ALMP) in recent years. With the introduction of the start-up subsidy (Existenzgründungszuschuss) on 1.1.2003 unemployed individuals who...