There is a research gap with respect to understanding the role of entrepreneurial culture and tradition for actual start-up behaviour. We combine historical self-employment data (entrepreneurial tradition) with a psychological measure for entrepreneurial attitudes (entrepreneurial culture). The...

This paper analyzes the evolution of geographical concentration in the West German manufacturing, service, and knowledge-intensive sectors over a time period of 30 years. Drawing on detailed plant data of 187 industries from 1980 to 2010, we observe substantial concentration that is highest in...

Technological change is often hypothesized as one of the main drivers of merger activities. This paper analyzes the role of technology in mergers and acquisitions (M&As) at the firm level. Based on a newly created data set that combines financial information and patent data for public limited...

This volume was prepared by Thomas Steinwachs while he was working at the ifo Center for International Economics. It was completed in September 2018 and accepted as a doctoral dissertation by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich (LMU). It is a collection of four self-contained...

Although there exists a vast literature on convergence and divergence of income levels across countries or regions at the aggregate level, there is only little work on convergence and/or diver- gence processes of productivity and wage levels at the more disaggregated industrial level. These are...

CEE countries such as Poland started to experience a very high rate of financial development within a few years after emerging from socialism. A review of the literature suggests that this asymmetric development should have been most beneficial for those industry sectors most dependent on...

Rajan and Zingales (1998) use U.S. Compustat firm data for the 1980s to obtain measures of manufacturing sectors? Dependence on External Finance (DEF). They take any differences in these measures to be structural/technological and thus applicable to other countries. Their joint assumptions about...

In this paper we empirically investigate the theoretical results obtained in Zaby (2009). From the theoretical model, which introduces the decision to patent into a setting with horizontally differentiated products we deduce several hypotheses and test these empirically. We find that the...

This paper empirically investigates a firm's propensity to patent. It thereby builds on a theoretical model on a firms' patenting decision in a market with vertically differentiated products. We deduce and empirically test several hypotheses from the theoretical results regarding patenting and...