In infant industries, a great share of new market opportunities is depleted by firms that spinoff from incumbents. A model emphasizing the relation between incumbents' evolving corporate cultures and the generation of spinoffs explains this regularity in industry evolution. Organizations reach a...

On the basis of a sample of 149 graduate firms from five German technology oriented business incubators, this article contributes to incubator/incubation literature by investigating the effects of the age of the business incubators and the firms' incubation time in securing longterm survival of...

Human capital is known to be one of the most important predictors of a person's earnings. With regard to entrepreneurial success, founders' human capital is an important determinant of firm's employment growth as well. This paper investigates if the depreciation of a founder's academic knowledge...

Public policy is currently shifting from SME policy towards entrepreneurship policy, which supports entrepreneurship without directing attention to quantitative goals and specific firms or employment groups. The institutional framework set by public policy affects the prevalence and performance...

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...

What is the impact of firm entry regulation on sustained entry into self-employment? How does firm entry regulation influence the performance of long-living entrants? In this paper, I address these questions by exploiting a natural experiment in firm entry regulation. After German reunification,...

Empirical work on micro and small firms has focused on developed countries. The little work that exists on developing countries is all too often based on small samples taken from ad hoc questionnaires. The census data we analyze are fairly representative of the structure of small business in...

One of the most salient and relevant dimensions of team heterogeneity is ethnicity. We measure the causal impact of ethnic diversity on the performance of business teams using a randomized field experiment. We follow 550 students who set up 45 real companies as part of their curriculum in an...

This paper analyses the effect of risk attitudes of firm owners on profits among micro and small enterprises (MSEs) in Lagos, Nigeria. Higher risk perceptions are shown to have a significant positive effect on profits, whereas risk propensity has a negative or no effect. Education, age, being...

The creation of spinoff companies is often promoted as a desirable mechanism for transferring knowledge and technologies from research organizations to the private sector for commercialization. In the promotion process, policymakers typically treat these “university” spinoffs like industry...