This paper reviews the literature on incubators in developed and developing countries. We show that the concept of incubators has evolved in time according to market and firm needs. Contemporary successful incubators are profit-oriented, provide a wide range of services, focus more on intangible...

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...

Start-ups mostly have only limited internal financing. Post-entry performance should thus strongly depend on the availability of new external capital. In this study we analyze the impact of financial constraints on the performance of Swiss start-ups. Since we use cohort data, we have for some...

The paper analyzes internal factors which influence the use of equity - and mezzanine-based financing instruments in German privately held family firms. Based on a sample of 195 surveys of family firms, we investigate the impact of family specific goals and corporate governance structures on the...

What is the impact of firm entry regulation on sustained entry into self-employment? How does firm entry regulation influence the performance of long-living entrants? In this paper, I address these questions by exploiting a natural experiment in firm entry regulation. After German reunification,...

Whether policy support should be designed differently for women entrepreneurs is a particularly relevant question. To answer this, and to inform the design of policies to provide appropriate support for women entrepreneurs, the paper compares male and female perceptions of typical...

The amendment to the German Trade and Crafts Code in 2004 offers a natural experiment to asses the causal effects of this reform on the probabilities of being self-employed and transition into and out of self-employment, using cross-sections (2002-2006) of German microcensus data. This study...

In this introductory chapter to a collective volume,* we build on Baumol‘s (1990) framework to categorize, catalog, and classify the budding research field that explores the interplay between institutions and entrepreneurship. Institutions channel entrepreneurial supply into productive or...

This paper examines the association between the outcome of business incubation and the resources used by incubators, by using a small panel of science and technology business incubators (STBIs) in China. We find that while the number of firms graduating from an STBI is closely correlated with...