Despite the importance of business creation for the economy and a relevant share of new firms being started out of unemployment, most research has focused on analyzing the effect of unemployment insurance (UI) policies on re-employment outcomes that ignore self-employment. In this paper, we...

Gibrat’s law predicts that firm growth is purely random and should be independent of firm size. We use a random effects–random coefficient model to test whether Gibrat’s law holds at the firm level in the Swedish energy market. No study has investigated whether Gibrat’s law holds for...

The pace of job reallocation has declined in all U.S. sectors since 2000. In standard models, aggregate job reallocation depends on (a) the dispersion of idiosyncratic productivity shocks faced by businesses and (b) the marginal responsiveness of businesses to those shocks. Using several novel...

Analyzing data on all U.S. employers in a cohort of entering firms, we document a highly skewed size distribution, such that the largest 5% account for over half of cohort employment at firm birth and more than two-thirds at firm age 7. Little of the size variation is accounted for by industry...

Die unternehmerische Selbständigkeit hat in Deutschland in den letzten 20 Jahren einen starken Aufschwung erfahren. Die Zahl der Selbständigen ist zwischen 1991 und 2009 um 40 Prozent gestiegen. Verantwortlich für diese Entwicklung sind die Nachholprozesse in Ostdeutschland, der...

Entrepreneurial self-employment in Germany has undergone a strong upturn in the last 20 years. The number of self-employed people rose by 40 percent between 1991 and 2009. The reasons for this development are the catch-up processes in eastern Germany, structural change towards the service...

Entrepreneurial self-employment in Germany has undergone a strong upturn in the last 20 years. The number of self-employed people rose by 40 percent between 1991 and 2009. The reasons for this development are the catch-up processes in eastern Germany, structural change towards the service...

Die unternehmerische Selbständigkeit hat in Deutschland in den letzten 20 Jahren einen starken Aufschwung erfahren. Die Zahl der Selbständigen ist zwischen 1991 und 2009 um 40 Prozent gestiegen. Verantwortlich für diese Entwicklung sind die Nachholprozesse in Ostdeutschland, der...