It is still an open question what kind of smart capital relational investors actually supply. We divide smart capital into several components and conduct a survey among 85 German suppliers of start-up finance. The results show that the degree of "smartness" is determined by the financial product...

We examine whether founders' backgrounds influence new firm survival in the early years after start-up. We develop hypotheses linking founders' back-grounds to pre-entry capabilities associated with entrepreneurial human capital, highlighting the cases of spin-offs and habitual entrepreneurs....

This study is the first to examine the decision to re-enter business ownership by entrepreneurs who have exited their first business using a longitudinal matched employer-employee database. This kind of data allow us to distinguish between those serial entrepreneurs who re-enter business...

This paper is concerned with the relationship between innovative success of entrepreneurs and their prior knowledge at the stage of firm formation. We distinguish between different kinds of experience an entrepreneur can possess and find evidence that the innovative success subsequent to firm...

This study explores individual and country-level environmental drivers of informal "seed" investment. We examine four types of informal investors based on business ownership experience (or no such experience) and close family relationship with investee (or no such relationship): "classic love...

Whereas initially physical capital and later, knowledge capital were viewed as crucial for growth, more recently a very different factor, entrepreneurship capital, has emerged as a dri-ving force of economic growth. In this paper, we define a region's capacity to create new firms start-ups as...

Demographic change will be one of the major challenges for economic policy in the developed world in the next decades. In this article, we analyze the relationship between age structure and the number of startups. We argue that an individual's decision to start a business is determined by his or...

An important literature has made a fundamental link between corporate governance and corporate strategy. According to agency theory, assigning managers stock options aligns their interests with the interests of the owners of the firm. This paper suggests that this may not apply in the context of...

What is meant by entrepreneurship, innovation and economic growth is often not clear or very idiosyncratic. This paper starts with a discussion of the nature of entrepreneurship and its relation to innovation. The second section provides an overview of theory and empirical research on the...