Many firms fail shortly after inception. Yet individuals continue starting businesses. Prewar economists such as Keynes invoked animal spirits and stressed psychological factors in their explanations of economic behavior. Using a large sample obtained from surveys conducted in 18 countries, we...

The paper analyzes the adoption of various e-business technologies. Strong empirical evidence is found for the existence of increasing returns to adoption due to indirect network externalities between related technologies. If a company is close to the technological frontier, its probability of...

We use a sample of 18 countries to study what variables have a significant impact on an indi-vidual’s decision to start a new business and classification and regression trees for an accurate interpretation of the data. Our results support existing literature suggesting the existence of strong...