This paper investigates some crucial aspects of the recent development of industrial districts in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy, where this type of spatial agglomeration of industrial firms has flourished since the period immediately after the Second World War. In particular, it is aimed at...

We analyze the effect of industry, region, and time on new business survival rates by means of a multidimensional approach. The data relate to West German counties in the 1983-2000 period. Survival chances of start-ups tend to be relatively low in industries characterized by a high minimum...

In our analysis of the impact of new business formation on regional employment change we identified considerable time lags. We investigated the structure and extent of these time lags by applying the Almon lag model and found that new firms can have both a positive and a negative effect on...

This paper examines the relationship between cultural values, political institutions and government regulation of entry. For this, it couples data for 53 countries from a variety of sources in comparative political economy and cross-cultural psychology. A society's general attitude towards risk...

The paper analyses the impact of venture capital finance on growth and innovation activities of young German firms. Among other variables, our panel of firm data includes data on venture capital funding and patent applications. With statistical matching procedures we draw an adequate control...

The paper makes three contributions to the economics literature on entrepreneurship. We offer a new measure of entrepreneurship which accounts for variations in persistence in self-employment. We outline an econometric methodology to account for this approach and find that it is superior to...

This paper proposes a business-demographics adjusted shift-share analysis. This can be used when data availability does not allow direct association of employment changes to business demographics at the regional level. The method may be also used as an exploratory step before any explanatory...

Working within the 'distributional approach', this research offers evidence, based on empirical density estimates and modality tests, of past polarization in regional labour productivity in EU-15. Most importantly, it provides evidence on the related ergodic density which suggests that this...

We quantify the value of changes in life circumstances in Germany following reunification. To this end, we develop and implement a fixed-effect estimator for ordinal life satisfaction in the German Socio-Economic Panel. We find strong negative effects on life satisfaction from being recently...