This paper provides empirical evidence that young university spin-offs are more likely to receive venture capital than other technological start-ups. In addition, this fact is explained mainly by the lack of managerial skills among the founders of certain university spin-offs. The data used have...

This chapter provides further evidence on the role of uncertainty and job complexity in pay-for-performance and autonomy decisions. It proposes an encompassing econometric approach in order to explain the differences in previous outcomes that may be due to differing methodological approaches....

Purpose: With Spanish Community Innovation Survey data, this paper tests two main hypotheses as explanation of the fall in business innovation output in the Great Recession: the aggregate demand effect (firms have lower propensity to initiate innovation projects in recession than in contraction...

This paper analyzes incentive design when agents' effort influences an uncertain output governed by a random process with semi-heavy tails. We find that the second-best incentive contract pays an output-increasing but bounded fee with a shape resembling performance-standard contracts that pay a...

This article examines the determinants of the equilibrium number of entrepreneurs and the level of productivity in economies where individuals make occupational choices between being self-employed or working as an employee. The results of the theoretical model explain some observed empirical...

The high levels of operating efficiency, profits, and market values for banks in the years before the financial crisis raise reasonable doubts about the accuracy of the assessments of the efficiency of banking intermediation. We examine the productivity growth in Spanish banks in the pre-crisis...

This paper models learning by experience beyond the experience curve, including the possibility of “learning to learn”: the pace of learning increases over time by building on what has already been learned. We compare the extended deterministic learning model with Jovanovic and Nyarkos' [26]...