We study the role of the business cycle in the individual decision of own-account workers to hire employees. Using panel data from the European Community Household Panel for the EU-15 countries, we show that own-account workers are less likely to hire employees during recessions. Next, we focus...

Given the big employment losses in the current economic and financial crisis, not only the creation of new jobs is important for economic and social welfare, but also the conservation of existing jobs. In this respect, it is crucial that firms which employ personnel, survive. In this paper we...

This paper examines the impact of employment protection legislation (EPL) on hiring decisions by own-account workers and firing decisions by very small firms (1-4 employees). Using data from the EU-15 countries, our results show that the strictness of employment protection legislation is...

Human capital obtained through education has been shown to be one of the strongest drivers of entrepreneurship performance. The entrepreneur’s human capital, though, is only one of the input factors into the production process of her venture. In this paper we will analyze to what extent the...

Despite the fact that the main contribution of entrepreneurship theory to economics has been to provide an account of the performance of markets in disequilibrium, little empirical research on entrepreneurship has examined firm entry and exit in this context. In this paper, we attempt to redress...

We estimate a two-equation model to jointly determine the number of informal investors and the amount of money that they invest over the last 3 years. Our model uses data on 126,189 individuals in 21 highly developed countries in the period 2002-2006. We delve deeper into the hypothesis of Burke...

The relation between profits and the number of firms in a market is one of the essential topics in the field of industrial organization. Usually, the relation is modeled in an error-correction framework where profits and/or the number of firms respond to out-of-equilibrium situations. In an...

The recent work of Kim and Mauborgne (2005a) has sought to turn strategic management on its head. They note that the field has been dominated by Porter’s (1980, 1985) competitive strategy and it has placed too much emphasis on the importance of competition and rivalry. By contrast they argue...

This paper examines the prevalence and the determinants of informal entrepreneurial investment activity (i.e. the 3 FFFs –friends, fools and family– and business angels), using a data set of more than 175,000 individuals – including some 4000 informal investors – in a large number of...

Job satisfaction of self-employed and paid-employed workers is analyzed using the European Community Household Panel for the EU-15 covering the years 1994-2001. We distinguish between two types of job satisfaction, i.e. job satisfaction in terms of type of work and job satisfaction in terms of...