Abstract The current paper deals with the labour market effects of European Monetary Union (EMU). We compare the EU-memberstates’ susceptibility to asymmetric shocks and their labour market flexibility under status quo conditions. The findings are related to the question which countries are -...

The German Federal Government has undertaken a series of particularly interesting policy experiments in the field of technology policy in recent years, a major policy innovation being the explicit recognition of regional clustering aspects in federal support programmes. The paper provides a...

The current paper analyzes the role of the individual and regional knowledge context in forming university students’ entrepreneurial intentions. As access to knowledge resources is crucial for the growth and survival of knowledge-based start-ups, we argue that an individual’s decision in...

This paper analyzes the impact of different individual skills and their economy-wide distribution among heterogenous entrepreneurs on a country's catching up-process to the world technology frontier (WTF). Highly skilled entrepreneurs qualify as either technological specialists or as broadly...

Start-ups in different industry groups are classified according to their average complexity. We find that thick regional input markets are conducive to start-up activity in general and complex start-ups in particular, but that some inputs are more important than others.

In this paper we investigate the determinants of entrepreneurial activity in a cross section of German regions for the period 1998-2005. Departing from the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship, the focus of our analysis is on the role of the regional environment and, in particular,...