This paper discusses the role of so-called national champions within the context of the EU's ambitious goal to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economic region in the world by 2010. We find football to be a useful analogy in our discussion of national champions. There are...

Demographic change will be one of the major challenges for economic policy in the developed world in the next decades. In this article, we analyze the relationship between age structure and the number of startups. We argue that an individual's decision to start a business is determined by his or...

Marshall's student Pigou noted: It's all in Marshall. From a static point of view, this seems rather bold in a constantly changing world. However, this statement becomes more plausible in a dynamic context, where principles are subject to change. Indeed, over time, Marshall's concept of external...

Demographic change will be one of the major challenges for economic policy in the developed world in the next decades. In this article, we analyze the relationship between age structure and the number of startups. We argue that an individual's decision to start a business is determined by his or...

Keeping up with rapid technological change necessitates constant innovation. Successful innovation depends on both incumbent workers' knowledge, based on experience, and knowledge about the latest technologies, along with the skills needed to implement them. Both of these knowledge-based...

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 whether time-persistent cultural borders impede economic exchange across regions of the same country. To measure cultural differences we evaluate, for the first time in economics, linguistic micro-data about phonological and grammatical features of German dialects. These data are...

This paper tests the importance of social contacts on entrepreneurship. To measure differences in the interconnectedness of social contacts, we compare rural and agglomerated areas. A smaller community size in rural areas generates greater network closure. Agents' neighborhoods are more likely...

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...

This paper investigates the impact of implicit institutions on the decision to become an entrepreneur. Implicit institutions are here defined as mindsets that have developed as the result of norms and traditions and we expect they will have an influence on risk attitudes and opportunity...