The supposed creativity of left-handed and dyslexic individuals may fit well with an entrepreneurial occupation. Empirical evidence from two representative Dutch samples, however, shows that left-handed and dyslexic individuals are not more likely to be(come) entrepreneurs than right-handed and...

Is India’s high fractionalization associated with mistrust between its two main religious communities? An inter-ethnic trust game field experiment confirms intergroup bias in mutually lower offers between urban Muslims and Hindus in Mumbai. There are no differences in trustworthiness based on...

This study quantifies the disadvantage in literacy skills that arises from the linguistic distance between their mother tongue and host country language, combining individual cross-country data on literacy scores with unique information on the linguistic distance between languages.

We analyze the determinants of reading literacy, mathematical skills and science skills of young immigrant children in The Netherlands. We find that these are affected by age at immigration and whether or not one of the parents is native Dutch.

Using the interaction of language of country of birth and age-at-arrival as instruments, we find strong evidence of a causal effect of English as Additional Language (EAL) on the native–immigrant wage gap for male employees in the UK.

This paper examines the impact of employment protection legislation (EPL) on hiring decisions by own-account workers and firing decisions by very small firms (one to four employees). Using data from the EU-15 countries, our results show that the strictness of employment protection legislation is...

Cressy (2000) argues that the positive correlation between assets and the rate of business startups is due to DARA preferences. We show however that the required property is prudence, and prudence is consistent with DARA, IARA or CARA.

This work demonstrates the very existence of economic rents in franchising using, for the first time, the franchisees’ actual financial statements. This finding makes franchising more appealing for applicants and supports the hypothesis that rents are efficient devices to motivate franchisees.

Unconditionally, pushed spin-offs are found to survive longer than their pulled counterparts. Using matched employer–employee data and novel multivariate decomposition techniques, we show that pushed spin-offs’ relative survival advantage is mostly explained by their larger human capital...