Well-functioning institutions, both formal (i.e. rule of law) and informal (i.e. trust), facilitate economic exchange. To investigate the nature of the relationship between formal and informal institutions, we analyze bilateral trade patterns in a sample of 16 European countries between...

Research on how multinational firms deal with home–host cultural differences argues that cultural differences are minimized and assumes that foreign cultures are homogenous. In this paper we relax the cultural homogeneity assumption. In the presence of cultural variation in host countries the...

This paper is about the relationship betweeninnovation and geography. Much of theliterature on regional economics and innovationsuggests that knowledge spillovers are boundedby distance. But distance is a relative conceptand how local is local? Based on a uniquedataset of 1510 Dutch firms we...

This paper investigates the relationship between entrepreneurial culture and the rate of nascent entrepreneurship. Embedded in trait research, we develop a new composite measure of entrepreneurial culture using data from the World Values Survey. To corroborate the results obtained when...

We study a cross-section of 54 European regions in the period 1950-1998. The central question is whether social capital, in the form of generalized trust and associational activity, is related to regional differences in economic growth. Based on extensive robustness tests, we present evidence...

In the literature factors like entrepreneurial ability, regional innovative potential, and entrepreneurial human capital are emphasized in explaining the economic success of regions. Using the European Values Studies (EVS) dataset on norms and values in 54 European regions, we distinguish values...

This paper is concerned with the personality characteristics of self-employed. Most existing studies on personality characteristics of entrepreneurs concentrate on factors like age, educational profile, and motivations to become self-employed. There is a lack of significant empirical findings to...