The employability of an aging population in a world of continuous and biased technical change is top of the political agenda. Due to endogenous human capital depreciation the effective retirement age is often below statutory retirement age resulting in permanent non-employability of older...

We propose that the rate of creation and failure of start-up firms can be modelled as a search and matching process, following labor market matching models. Setting out an endogenous growth model with entrepreneurship we derive a Entrepreneurship Beveridge Curve, through which we illustrate that...

Over the past decades there has been ample evidence that a manufacturing sector plays an important role in overall development. In East Asia, recent job creation in industry has lifted large parts of the population to higher income levels. However, while this connection is well supported by...

As the time of leaving school determines the level of academic achievement this timing decision is central for the human capital investment decision. Real option theory offers a new perspective of the human capital investment decision under uncertainty and irreversibility. Unlike other...

A stylized fact of economic development is the structural transformation of countries from traditional, mainly agricultural societies to modern economies dominated by manufacturing and services. In this paper we provide an endogenous growth model to illuminate the role of entrepreneurial...

Concerns about the duration of China's growth and hence the question of a permanent significant contribution of China to world economic growth relate, amongst other things, to the problem of reducing regional disparity in China. While China's high average growth is driven by a small number of...

Start-ups of new firms are important for economic growth. However, start-up rates differ significantly between countries and within regions of the same country. A large empirical literature studies the reasons for this and attempts to identify the regional determinants of start-ups. In contrast,...

The success of new start-up firms often depends on timing. It is valuable for the potential entrepreneur to wait for the right moment before starting a new firm. In this paper we provide a theoretical model to determine the optimal time for starting a new firm. We integrate insights from the...

Success in international trade depends, amongst other things, on distance from markets. Most new economic geography models focus on the distance between countries. In contrast much less theorizing and empirical analysis have focused on how distances within a country for instance due to the...