Academic spin-offs are one way in which employability of university graduates is reflected. Using the ZEW spinoff-survey, this paper studies empirically the impact of human capital on the success of academic spinoffs founding in knowledge and technology intensive sectors. The focus is thereby on...

In this paper I analyse how individuals match for for the purpose of setting up a new firm. As a theoretical basis I use the O-ring theory introduced by Kremer (1993) and applied to new firms by Fabel (2004). The O-ring theory predicts that individuals segregate between firms according to their...

In this paper, I analyse how the survival of new firms is affected by the average ability level in the founding team, the team size, team members' homogeneity with respect to ability, and team members' heterogeneity with respect to education. As a theoretical basis, I apply the O-ring theory...

Does heterogeneity in the educational backgrounds of the founders matter for firm success? Are team foundations more successful than single entrepreneurs? These questions are analysed using data on academic spinoffs in Germany. Firm success is measured by employment growth. I find that team...

This paper empirically studies the impact of the adoption of open source software (OSS) on firms' labor productivity and innovative behavior. Using a representative sample of German firms, the results show that the adoption of OSS operating systems for servers and general OSS applications has no...

Sechs Prozent aller Unternehmen, die in Deutschland im Jahr 2014 gegründet wurden, können der Kultur- und Kreativwirtschaft zugerechnet werden. Analog zum allgemeinen Trend gehen auch die Gründungen in diesen Wirtschaftsbereichen zurück. Es gibt aber deutliche Unterschiede in der...

Die Erwartungen an junge Hightech-Unternehmen sind hoch. Wettbewerb, Innovation, Beschäftigung sind die Stichworte dieser Erwartungen, deren Erfüllung vom dynamischen Wachstum eines möglichst großen Anteils der jungen Unternehmen abhängt. Aber nur ein kleiner Teil von ihnen wächst in den...

One way through which knowledge and technology transfer can take place is through the foundation of new firms by former employees of incumbent private firms. In this paper, we examine whether knowledge transferred from the incumbent causally affect employment growth and postentry innovation...

There remains considerable scholarly debate about the role that prior entrepreneurial experience plays in new venture survival. Drawing on entrepreneurial learning theories, we use panel data on 8,400 new ventures to investigate the impact of four different types of prior entrepreneurial...

We investigate the extent to which complementarities between technical and business skills of founders and employees matter for the generation of market novelties by new ventures. Using data about German start-ups, we find that there are no complementarities between technical and business skills...