Drawing on Baumol’s concepts of productive, unproductive and destructiveentrepreneurship and relevant amendments, this thesis aims to contribute to theentrepreneurship literature by developing a conceptual framework which allowsoperationalising the concepts for empirical assessment....

Does entrepreneurial optimism affect business performance? Using a unique data setbased on repeated survey design, we investigate this relationship empirically. Ourmeasures of ‘optimism’ and ‘realism’ are derived from comparing the turnovergrowth expectations of 133 owners-managers with...

Entrepreneurship education ranks highly on policy agendas in Europe and the US, butlittle research is available to assess its impacts. In this context it is of primary importanceto understand whether entrepreneurship education raises intentions to be entrepreneurialgenerally or whether it helps...

This paper investigates how patent applications and grants held by new ventures improve their abilityto attract venture capital (VC) financing. We argue that investors are faced with considerable uncertaintyand therefore rely on patents as signals when trying to assess the prospects of potential...

We study entrepreneurs’ start-up financing from banks and local financiers. An informalnetwork, whose membership cannot be observed by outsiders, conveys the good signals itgets about the hidden types of network entrepreneurs to local financiers, which are thenreflected in different loan...

Based on representative data, the German Micro-Census, we provide an overview of thedevelopment of self-employment and entrepreneurship in Germany between 1991 and 2010,the first two decades after reunification. We investigate the socioeconomic background ofthese individuals, their education,...

We investigate the interdependence of debt financing and R&D activities of young firms.Using micro-level data of the KfW/ZEW Start-up Panel, our estimation results show that firmcharacteristics are more important than personal characteristics of the founders for explainingyoung firms’...

This paper proposes that risk aversion encourages individuals to invest in balanced skillprofiles, making them more likely to become entrepreneurs. By not having taken this possiblelinkage into account, previous research has underestimated the impacts both of risk aversionand balanced skills on...

Limited access of entrepreneurs to credit constrains the creation and growth of private firms.In Africa, access to credit is particularly limited for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) dueto unclear property rights and the lack of assets that can be used as collateral. This paperpresents a...

There is no robust empirical support for the effect of financial incentives on the decision towork in self-employment rather than as a wage earner. In the literature, this is seen as apuzzle. We offer a focus on the opportunity cost, i.e. the wages given up as an employee.Information on income...