Does heterogeneity in the educational backgrounds of the founders matter for firm success? Are team foundations more successful than single entrepreneurs? These questions are analysed using data on academic spinoffs in Germany. Firm success is measured by employment growth. I find that team...

Several empirical studies showed that it is not the level of entrepreneurial activity itself, but the (long-term) survival and growth of new firms that determine the direct and indirect contribution of new businesses to regional employment. To this end, the aim of this paper is to analyze the...

The location of new establishments is a major issue from the perspective of economic activity and the analysis of the territory. Although both its determinants and consequences are multiple and complex, most studies are focused on single factors or aggregate approaches. This paper presents an...

We document two striking facts about U.S. firm dynamics and interpret their significance for aggregate employment dynamics. The first observation is the steady decline in the firm entry rate over the last thirty years, and the second is the gradual shift of employment from younger to older firms...

Economic growth requires factor reallocation across firms and continuous replacement of technologies. Labor market institutions influence economic dynamism by their impact on the supply of a key factor, skilled workers to new and expanding firms, and the shedding of workers from declining and...

Support for entrepreneurship is widely seen as a mechanism to facilitate prosperity and peace in a growing number of post-conflict states. In this paper I critically evaluate this view. I argue that entrepreneurship is a ubiquitous quality in post-conflict states but not necessarily always for...

There already exists broad literature investigating small and innovative firms in many respects. However, there have been few attempts to assess this group of firms´ propensity to patent or its patenting activities. This paper intends to fill that gap. By applying a new approach to account for...

Existing studies show a positive relationship between entrepreneurs' business performance and their conventional human capital as measured by previous business experience and formal education. In this paper, we explore whether illegal entrepreneurship experience (IEE), an unconventional form of...

This paper analyses the effect of risk attitudes of firm owners on profits among micro and small enterprises (MSEs) in Lagos, Nigeria. Higher risk perceptions are shown to have a significant positive effect on profits, whereas risk propensity has a negative or no effect. Education, age, being...

This paper reports about a field experiment conducted to estimate the impact of the share of women in business teams on their performance. Teams consisting of undergraduate students in business studies start up a venture as part of their curriculum. We manipulated the gender composition of teams...