Often, a person will become an entrepreneur only after a period of dependent employment, suggesting that occupational choices precede entrepreneurial choices. We investigate the relationship between occupational choice and self-employment. The findings suggest that the occupational choice of...

It has widely been recognized that creativity plays an immense role not only for arts, sciences, and technology, but also for entrepreneurship, innovation, and thus, economic growth. We analyze the level and the determinants of self-employment in creative professions at the level of individuals....

A multidimensional approach is applied to analyse simultaneously the effects of three groups of determinants on new business formation: industry, space, and changes over time. The data are for West Germany and covers the period from 1983 to 1997. Analysis indicates that the positive impact of...

This monograph reviews the current state of knowledge about the effects of new business formation on regional development. These effects are diverse and include the creation and destruction of employment, introduction of innovations, structural change, and increasing productivity, among others....

We investigate the role played by different fields of academic knowledge and various types of higher education institutions in the emergence of innovative start-ups in a region. We show that education and research in the applied and natural sciences have the strongest effect on the emergence of...

We apply a multi-level approach to analyze the effect of three groups of determinants on new firm formation simultaneously: industry, location and changes over time. The data are for West Germany and cover the 1983-97 period. Our analysis indicates, that innovation activities and the...

New firm location decisions, relative to incumbents may be based on a choice between two types of advantages: natural advantages or those that arise from social embeddedness, the latter of which may particularly include knowledge spillovers. We analyze the relative importance of geographically...

We analyze the extent to which endogenous cultural amenities affect the spatial equilibrium share of high-human-capital employees. To overcome endogeneity, we draw on a quasi-natural experiment in German history and exploit the exogenous spatial distribution of baroque opera houses built as a...

We analyze the effect of industry, region, and time on new businesssurvival rates by means of a multi-dimensional approach. The data relateto West German districts in the 1983-2000 period. The survival chancesof start-ups tend to be relatively low in industries characterized by ahigh minimum...

We argue that entrepreneurial choice proceeds in at least in two steps, with vocational choice nearly always preceding choice of employment status, whether that be self-employment or dependent employment. Since the two decisions are interrelated, analysis of entrepreneurial choice as a single...