Social networks matter in the innovation processes of young and small firms, since ‘innovation does not exist in a vacuum (Van De Ven, 1986: 601).’ The contacts a firm has could both generate advantages for further innovation and growth, and disadvantages leading to inertia and stagnation....

Analyzing a cross-country panel of 16 OECD countries from 2002 to 2005, we find that higher unemployment benefits crowd out nascent entrepreneurial activity. Our results hold regardless of entrepreneurial motivation (necessity or opportunity) and entrepreneurial type (imitative or innovative).

We are currently investigating genetic influences on self-employment in an international research consortium using genome-wide association studies (GWAS). By meta-analysing results from numerous independent samples we address identification issues arising from multiple testing. To our knowledge,...

Prior research has identified individual characteristics that distinguish business owners from non-business owners. We tested our contention that not every successful business owner can be characterized by such typical “entrepreneurial” characteristics. Multiple Analysis of Variance (MANOVA)...

We investigate whether women and men differ with respect to the steps they take in the entrepreneurial process, distinguishing between five successive steps described by the following positions: (1) "never thought about it"; (2) "thinking about starting up a business"; (3) "taking steps to start...

The knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship seeks to explain the fundamentals and consequences of entrepreneurship with respect to economic performance. This paper uses the knowledge spillover theory to explain different innovation outcomes. We hypothesize that a high rate of...

We study a unique sample of 1,547 nascent entrepreneurs in Germany and analyze which factors are associated with their start-up satisfaction. Our results identify a group of nascent entrepreneurs that “cannot get satisfaction” with their start-up because they did not choose to become...

Entrepreneurship has emerged as an important element in the organization of economies. This emergence did not occur simultaneously in all developed countries. Differences in growth rates are often attributed to differences in the speed with which countries embrace entrepreneurial energy. This...

We start our exploration of China’s institutional change by asking what the China experience can tell us about institutional economics and organization theory. We point to under-researched areas such as the formation of firms and the interplay between firms and local politics. Our findings...

Whereas the determinants of entrepreneurial choice have been thoroughly analyzed in the literature, little is known about the preferred mode of entry into entrepreneurship, such as taking over an existing business or starting a new venture. Using a large international dataset, this study reports...