The focus of this paper is on the choice of the unemployed between becoming an entrepreneur or not. It contributes to the literature by empirically investigating two hitherto neglected issues: What is the impact of risk aversion and personal contact with a role model in shaping the decision to...

When unemployed persons go into business, they often are characterized as necessity entrepreneurs, because push factors, namely their unemployment, likely prompted their decision. In contrast to this, business founders who have been previously employed represent opportunity entrepreneurs because...

Das Institut für Mittelstandsforschung (IfM) Bonn hat im Auftrag der Gesellschaft für innovative Beschäftigungsförderung mbH G.I.B. die von der G.I.B. begleiteten Gründungen evaluiert. Rund 3.800 Gründungswillige haben in den Jahren 2004 bis 2007 an den G.I.B. Gründungs- und...

The focus of this paper is on the choice of the unemployed between becoming an entrepreneur or not. It contributes to the literature by empirically investigating two hitherto neglected issues: What is the impact of risk aversion and personal contact with a role model in shaping the decision to...

The present paper examines the relationship between entrepreneurship, as measured by the variation in business ownership rates, and unemployment in Portugal in the period from 1972-2002. It concludes that Portugal has been a relative outlier in regard to the effects of entrepreneurship on...

This paper investigates the relation between changes in self-employment and changes in unemployment at the regional level in Spain in the period 1979-2001. We estimate a vec-tor autoregression model as proposed by Audretsch, Carree, van Stel and Thurik (2005) using a data base for Spanish...