The building blocks of our model are bounded-rational actors with specific sets of endowments: ’entrepreneurial spirit’, human capital and venture capital. The entrepreneurial behavior to found a firm is triggered by the individuals’ endowments, their social network and the evaluation of...

Technological progress in the biological sciences is now advancing across such a wide range and at such a pace, that, irrespective of size, no firm can hope to keep up in all the different areas. Participating in innovation networks, bundling of competencies and capabilities, therefore, offers...

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, independent entrepreneurial migrants from China have been increasingly flocking to Africa in search of greener pastures. This paper scrutinizes the empirical foundations of the increasingly hostile discourses of African traders regarding the...

This paper models an industrial revolution as a qualitative transition from a world where innovation is infrequent and haphazard to one where it is continuous and systematic. Pre-industrial innovation is treated as a social process where an individual's effectiveness as an innovator depends on...

While interest in social determinants of individual behavior has led to a rich theoretical literature and many efforts to measure these influences, a mature social econometrics has yet to emerge. This chapter provides a critical overview of the identification of social interactions. We consider...

Social capital has been recently held up as a conceptual framework to build a bridge between the diverse disciplines involved in rural development. However, despite its potential and the impressively rapid take-up of the concept by the community of development professionals, it remains an...

Information technologies play a very important role in modernizing Russia's economy and society as whole. Its competitive advantage lies in the availability of highly educated labour resources. Russia accounts for approximately 9% of researchers in the world as opposed to a share of about 0.3%...

China has turned from a 'low risk' to a 'high risk' society since the start of the market reforms in the late 1970s. Market, while bringing diverse livelihood opportunities to rural people, has simultaneously distributed risks, and the exposure and vulnerability to them unequally among different...