We examine whether founders backgrounds influence new firm survival in the early years after start-up. We develop hypotheses linking founders back-grounds to pre-entry capabilities associated with entrepreneurial human capital, highlighting the cases of spin-offs and habitual entrepreneurs. The...

This study is the first to examine the decision to re-enter business ownership by entrepreneurs who have exited their first business using a longitudinal matched employer-employee database. This kind of data allow us to distinguish between those serial entrepreneurs who re-enter business...

We examine turbulence over the product life cycle using the lowest possible level of industry aggregation, allowing for the use of panel data to study the evolution of single product markets. We find that replacement of exiting firms by subsequent entry plays a primary role in generating...

This paper analyses the effects of innovation networks on product and pro-cess innovation and sales growth of high technology SMEs. Innovation net-works are positively related to both product and process innovation, i.e. know-ledge creation. One exception is the negative effect of innovation...

This case follows Sethu Sethunarayanan, Director of the non-profit Center for the De-velopment of Disadvantaged People (CDDP), which is dedicated to the improvement of the Irula tribe in rural villages of southeast India. The Irulas specialize in catching rats, an activity which provides the...

This study explores individual and country-level environmental drivers of informal “seed” investment. We examine four types of informal investors based on business ownership experience (or no such experience) and close family relationship with investee (or no such relationship): “classic love...

Whereas initially physical capital and later, knowledge capital were viewed as crucial for growth, more recently a very different factor, entrepreneurship capital, has emerged as a dri-ving force of economic growth. In this paper, we define a region’s capacity to create new firms start-ups as...

This paper investigates the relation between changes in self-employment and changes in unemployment at the regional level in Spain in the period 1979-2001. We estimate a vec-tor autoregression model as proposed by Audretsch, Carree, van Stel and Thurik (2005) using a data base for Spanish...

The aim of this paper is to test whether patent-based indicators are still reliable measures of innovativeness in light of organizational changes in the field of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protection and the regulatory reforms already under way respectively at the U.S. Patent and...

This paper investigates whether the presence of ambitious entrepreneurs is a more important determinant of national economic growth than entrepreneurial activity in general. We use data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor to test the extent to which high growth ambitions of entrepreneurs...