This volume was prepared by Sebastian Benz while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes five self-contained chapters. All chapters discuss different...

This thesis attempts to analyze a part of the big and complex process of how intellectualproperty ownership and technological innovation influence the performance of firms andtheir revenues. Here I analyze a firm's stock market performance as a function of thequantity and quality of intellectual...

This dissertation picks the influence of proximity on the innovative behavior of firms out as a central theme. We concentrate on geographical and technological proximity and investigate their impact on learning through knowledge spillovers and the technological outcome in the form of product and...

This thesis focuses on returnee entrepreneurs in a large industrial cluster, ZhongguancunScience Park in Beijing, based on a combined quantitative and qualitative method. Usinga hand-collected dataset of returnee entrepreneur-owned 353 SMEs (small and mediumenterprises) and local...