The Common Task Improvement of Regional Economic Structureʺ is one of the most important instruments for the Reconstruction Eastʺ. Herein the federal states have an extensive flexibility to define their own kind of industrial policy. Due to their structural deficits this paper is focused on...

Protestant missions from the United States entered the Republic of Korea and Guatemala at the same time (1884 and 1882, respectively). Yet, their impact on human capital has been divergent. The analysis presented in this paper supports the findings of Woodberry (2004, 2009, 2011) and Nunn (2009)...

The purpose of this research endeavor - in the form of eight articles - to be published in 2013 in a Special Section of Industrial and Corporate Change is to further our understanding of the extent, character and orientation of entrepreneurial activity in today's wealthy countries. This is done...

We survey the literature on venture capital and institutions and present a case study comparing the development of the venture capital market in the US to Sweden. Our literature survey underscores that the legal environment, financial market development, the tax system, labor market regulations,...

Even before the onset of the 2008 global financial crisis and ongoing European debt crisis, much attention has been given to the re-emergence of the Asian giants, the People's Republic of China (PRC) and India. Both countries have attained unprecedented growth and economic development-PRC and...

This paper deals with economic growth in Europe. The special emphasis is in key institutional factors that are commonly assumed to affect aggregate growth: functioning of labor markets, availability of labor and capital, and the size of government. For more explicit measures, we use the data on...

We propose a theory by which geographic variations in the transparency of the production process explain cross-regional differences in the scale of the state, in its hierarchical structure, and in property rights over land. The key linkage between geography and these institutions, we posit, is...

Why do some countries industrialize much earlier than others? One widely-accepted answer is that markets need to be large enough for producers to find it profitable to bear the fixed cost of introducing modern technologies. This insight, however, has limited explanatory power, as illustrated by...

This paper seeks to quantify the impact of transaction costs on cross-country economic growth. Our evidence from a cross-country panel data regression analysis reveals a persistent and robust negative effect of increasing transaction costs on the path of economic growth. The growth-enhancing...