We investigate the effect of social capital access on entrepreneurship. Social capital helps entrepreneurs to overcome resource constraints. This is especially important in small communities where we often see a lack of market-oriented institutions such as venture capital firms. Entrepreneurs...

Leere Haushaltskassen verleiten die politisch Verantwortlichen schnell dazu, am Kulturetat zu sparen. Das könnte sich als kontraproduktiv erweisen, denn kulturelle Angebote steigern das regionale Wirtschaftswachstum. Eine aktuelle Studie des ifo Instituts, die zusammen mit der Universität Jena...

Can local industrial policies increase local firm competitiveness? Cluster-oriented policies targeted at selected industries have just such a goal and are very popular among politicians, despite the controversy surrounding these policies in academia. Thus, it would appear useful to discover if...

Research analyzing the importance of human capital for innovation usually focuses on secondary and tertiary education. This paper takes a different perspective by focusing on in-firm training. We argue that continuous training guarantees access to leading-edge knowledge and thus increases a...

This paper analyzes the effects on voting behavior of information disseminated over the Internet. We address endogeneity in Internet availability by exploiting regional and technological peculiarities of the preexisting voice telephony network that hindered the roll-out of fixed-line...

We test whether new firms locate close to incumbent firms of the same industry. Tendencies to coagglomerate may explain the general wisdom that industry location is highly persistent over time. We perform separate analysis for East and West Germany which enables us to study two integrated areas...

Why are better educated and more risk-friendly persons more mobile across regions? To answer this question, we use micro-data on internal migrants from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) 2000–2006 and merge this information with a unique proxy for region-pair-specific cultural distances...