Can TV influence the entrepreneurial decisions of individuals? To identify causal effects, we utilize a quasi-natural experiment, namely that during the division of Germany after WWI into the capitalistic West Germany and the socialistic East Germany, West TV was exogenously available only in...

There is a large and successful literature exploiting the division and re-unification of Germany as a natural experiment for analysing the effects of political regimes on economic behaviour. This paper contributes to this literature by reassessing the role of legacy effects of socialist labour...

Over the past decades, entrepreneurial activity has started to be considered a third mission of higher education institutions. Our study examines the extent to which entrepreneurship at universities is driven by spatial proximity between university faculties. To this end, we use a new dataset...

We investigate the role of entrepreneurship culture and the historical knowledge base of a region on current levels of new business formation in innovative industries. The analysis is for German regions and covers the time period 1907-2014. We find a pronounced positive relationship between high...

Previous research suggests that entrepreneurs value autonomy more than non-entrepreneurs do across countries and institutional contexts. However, most evidence exists for contexts with more or less entrepreneurship-facilitating and stable institutional frame-work conditions while we do not know...

We study the case of Vietnam to assess the long-lasting role of institutional and historical legacy on entrepreneurial outcomes. In particular, we investigate the detrimental effect of socialist institutions on entrepreneurship. Vietnam offers a unique quasi-experimental setting because the...

We investigate the geographic concentration of patenting in large cities using a sample of 14 developed countries. There is wide dispersion of the share of patented inventions in large metropolitan areas. South Korea and the US are two extreme outliers where patenting is highly concentrated in...

Popular theories claim that innovation activities should be located in large cities because of more favorable environmental conditions that are absent in smaller cities or remote and rural areas. Germany provides a clear counterexample to such theories. We argue that a main force behind the...

We investigate whether the Roman presence in the southern part of Germany nearly 2,000 years ago had a deep imprinting effect with long run consequences on a broad spectrum of measures ranging from present-day personality profiles to a number of socioeconomic outcomes and why. Today's...

We investigate how major historical shocks affect regional trajectories of economic activity. To this end, we conduct a comparative analysis of the development of entrepreneurship in East and West Germany after World War II. The introduction of an anti-entrepreneurial socialist economy in East...