The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between an entrepreneur's experience and education and his/her reliance on alternative sources of knowledge for exploring new business opportunities. The extant literature that is at the crossroads between sources of knowledge and the...

The importance and contribution of new technology-based Firms (NTBFs) to long term economic development is at the center of a controversial debate. This paper provides an overview of the current status of research on various issues concerning NTBFs in Germany. The issues covered include the...

New firm set ups, especially in High Tech industries, can give important impulses for the technological development and the catch up process in the Neuen Bundes1aender. The paper at hand gives an overview about the formation behaviour considering the preconditions of the former German Democratic...

During the last years more and more discussions came up about the contribution of technology-oriented and technology-intensive industries for the economic development and employment. The estimates of the determinants of the regional number of firm formations point out differences between the...

Our analysis of the survival of firms leads to the important result that the hypotheses about differences between various industries in the life duration of new firms and about the importance of the region of location for the probability of survival are confirmed. Many more enterprises are...

Our research, based on the ZEW-Foundation Panel East, examines whether high-tech start-ups are mainly founded in scientific and infrastructural well suited regions or not. Estimation results on the level of postcode areas confirm the hypothesis that specific human capital, knowledge spillovers...

For firms acting in technological niches the expansion into foreign markets can be a way to increase sales and to thus to recover initial sunk costs over a shorter time frame. Our research, based on survey data for nearly 600 British and German high-tech start-ups, examines whether...

This paper seeks to empirically identify factors that influence the probability of beinga fast growingfirm in Eastern and Western Germany. Descriptive analyses have shown that most firms experience only small positive or negative employment growth or stagnate over time. The job generation...