Environmental innovations may contribute to both improving the environmental quality of products and increasing the resource efficiency of products and processes. In particular, energy and resource efficiency innovations (hereafter: EREIs) are seen as win-win opportunities. The German...

This paper investigates cost and profit efficiency of German hospitals. More specifically, it deals with the question how hospital efficiency varies with ownership, patient structure,and other exogenous factors, which are neither inputs nor outputs of the production process.We conduct a...

Insights into strategic antecedents and consequences of management support activities that German venture capital firms (VCFs) provide for portfolio companies (PCs) they have invested in are presented. Such support activities, their primary determinants, and their impacts on the economic...

Little research has been done on the transition fromunemployment to self-employment as influenced by "bridging allowances"(BA) and on the effects of BA on business survival and growth.Because ofincreased levels of unemployment among German workers, the German governmenteased restrictions on...

The reemergence of self-employment in mostWestern European countries since the 1980s is seen as a reaction to changes inthe organization of work in Europe, and not necessarily an effect of economicmodernization. The development and features of self-employment are traced ineight Western European...

Using German panel data from 1984 to 2007, we analyze the impact of labor division between husband and wife on the risk of divorce. Gary Becker's theory of marriage predicts that specialization in domestic and market work, respectively, reduces the risk of separation. Traditionally, the...

The well-documented positive correlation between income risk and wealth was interpreted as evidence for high amounts of precautionary wealth in various studies. However, the large estimates emerged from pooling non-entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs without controlling for heterogeneity. This paper...

Existing data sets on firm formations in Germany suffer from various shortcomings that prohibit sound analyses of new firms’ development over time. Therefore, the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), KfW Bankengruppe and Creditreform are cooperating to form a start-up panel for...

This paper contributes to the literature of academic entrepreneurship by investigating the effect of a possible depreciation of academic knowledge after leaving the university. The possibility of a person's human capital depreciation has up to now mainly been used to explain forgone earnings due...

While there are numerous studies on the measurement of the technical or cost efficiency of local governments, the analysis of the main drivers of this efficiency has attracted far less attention in this literature. However, information about the main sources of (in) efficiency are not...