Trotz eines stetigen Anstiegs der Anzahl von selbstständigen Frauen in Deutschland hat sich der sogenannte Gender-Gap kaum verringert. Die vorlie-gende Studie untersucht auf Basis des Nationalen Bildungspanels (NEPS), ob bzw. inwieweit familienbedingte Erwerbsunterbrechungen, die aus...

Auf der Basis der Einkommensteuerdaten lassen sich Angaben zu Selbstständigen sowie zu Gründungen nach Tätigkeitsarten ermitteln. Bis zum Jahr 2007 ist die Anzahl der Personen mit selbstständigen Tätigkeiten auf 6,8 Millionen gestiegen. Davon entfallen rund eine Million auf...

Many basic economic theories with perfectly functioning markets do not predict the existence of the vast number of microenterprises readily observed across the world. We put forward a model that illuminates why financial and managerial capital constraints may impede experimentation, and thus...

Social scientists studying entrepreneurship have emphasized three distinct sets of variables: the institutional environment, sociological variables, and personal and psychological characteristics. We are conducting surveys in five large developing and transition economies to better understand...

We test whether managerial human capital has a first order effect on the performance and growth of small enterprise in emerging markets. In a randomized control trial in Puebla, Mexico, we randomly assigned 150 out of 432 small and medium size enterprises to receive subsidized consulting...

We show how financial and managerial constraints impede experimentation and thus limit learning about the profitability of investments. Imperfect information about one’s own type, but willingness to experiment to learn one’s type, leads to short-run negative expected returns to investments,...

Recent concepts as megaregions and polycentric urban regions emphasize that external economies are not confined to a single urban core, but shared among a collection of close-by and linked cities. However, empirical analyses of agglomeration and agglomeration externalities so-far neglects the...

The current debate on polycentric urban development suggests that inter-firm relations are important for the creation and sustainment of urban networks. Conceptually, the degrees of spatial and functional integration and urban complementarities in economic network relations are hypothesised to...

The paper unravels the subversive nature of Schumpeter’s proposition that entrepreneurs carry out innovations (the micro level), that swarms of followers imitate them (meso) and that, as a consequence, 'creative destruction’ leads to economic development 'from within’...

This paper provides an overview of the role of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) in employment generation in both advanced and developing countries and a critique of the 'job generation' literature in both contexts. It sets out an analytical approach to the question of SME growth based...