Sino-European trade relations have been controversially discussed mainly, if not only, because of the increasing European Union's bilateral trade deficit with China. As from the European perspective trade with China becomes more important, the structural adjustment process of the Chinese economy...

The claim of a positive association between a firm’s social assets and its inno-vative capacity is a widely debated topic in the literature. Although controversial, such an argument has informed recent innovation policy across Germany, increasingly di-rected to cluster formation. In the light...

In economic development, structural change among the three main sectors of an economy accompanies with aggregate economic growth. Nevertheless the question whether economic growth causes structural change or change in the economic structure causes aggregate growth is still unanswered. To shed...

Recent empirical research has found that the effect of new business formation on employment emerges over a period of about ten years and has identified a 'wave' pattern of these effects. In this study, we decompose the overall contribution of new business formation on employment change into...

This paper discusses aspects related to the green technology sector in Germany. In a ?rst step institutional reforms enabling diffusion of green technologies are analysed. Cost arguments are also taken into account. In a second step a theoretical model developed by Tanguay et al. (2004) is...

We analyze the effects of asymmetric information concerning the size of a pie on proposer behavior in three different bargaining situations: the ultimatum game, the Yes-No-game and the dictator game. Our data show that (a) irrespective of the information condition, proposer generosity increases...

We investigate the lead-lag relationship between growth of patent applications, growth of R&D, and growth of total sectoral employment for 270 German labour market regions over the period 1999-2005. Our unique panel dataset includes information on four two-digit industries, namely Chemistry,...

Institutional settings and the resulting incentive structures are crucial for economic development. The type of entrepreneurial activity and the entrepreneurial effort are especially dependent on underlying incentive structures. We argue that institutions with better incentive structures for...

Ever since its introduction in the 1990s, the systems of innovations (SI) concept has received a great deal of attention from researchers and politicians. The systems of innovation policy (SIP) approach, which is based on the SI concept, is considered an alternative to neoclassical theory. Its...

Costly signaling of commitment to a group has been proposed as an explanation for participation in religion and ritual. But if the signal’s cost is too small, freeriders will send the signal and behave selfishly later. Effective signaling may then be prohibitively costly. If the average level...