A venture capitalist faces a trade-off between the extent of managerial advice allocated to each start-up and the total number of firms advised. Diminishing returns to advice per firm call for a larger portfolio. As advice gets diluted, further expansion of the portfolio eventually becomes...

Start-up entrepreneurs are often commercially inexperienced. In giving managerial advice, venture capitalists can importantly enhance the success of innovative but highly risky ventures. The supply of experienced venture capitalists is not easily increased, however. When the rate of business...

The paper investigates the consequences of outsourcing of labor intensive activities to low-wage economies. This trend challenges the two basic functions of the welfare state, redistribution and social insurance when private unemployment insurance markets are missing. The main results are: (i)...

Credit constraints are more frequent among growth companies with large investment opportunities. For the same reason, profit taxes may harm innovative firms more than standard ones. This paper develops a model of heterogeneous firms where an endogenous share opts for innovation and faces credit...

In the absence of financing frictions, profit taxes reduce investment by their effect on the user cost of capital. With finance constraints due to moral hazard, investment becomes sensitive to cash-flow and own equity of firms. We propose a corporate finance model of investment and derive three...

Bei dem so genannten "Job-Gipfel" hat sich die Bundesregierung mit Spitzenvertretern der Opposition auf Steuererleichterungen für Unternehmen geeinigt. Nach Ansicht von Jürgen R. Thumann, BDI, werden Steuerentlastungen zu mehr Investitionen und Arbeitsplätzen führen, denn "sie sind als...

Using a DSGE model with nominal wage rigidity, we investigate two scenarios for the Italian economy. The first considers sustained policy commitment to reform. The results indicate the possibility of ‘growing out of bad initial conditions’, if fiscal consolidation is combined with a program...

Start-up entrepreneurs are often commercially inexperienced. In giving managerial advice, venture capitalists can importantly enhance the success of innovative but highly risky ventures. The supply of experienced venture capitalists is not easily increased, however. When the rate of business...

The paper investigates the consequences of outsourcing of labor intensive activities to low-wage economies. This trend challenges the two basic functions of the welfare state, redistribution and social insurance when private unemployment insurance markets are missing. The main results are: (i)...