Is entrepreneurial talent entirely innate or do people learn to become entrepreneurs? We extend Lucas's (1978) model of entrepreneurship to allow for the possibility that entrepreneurial talents may be acquired by watching other entrepreneurs in action. This model implies that areas with a...

In the large literature on firm performance, economists have given little attention to entrepreneurs. We use deaths of more than 500 entrepreneurs as a source of exogenous variation, and ask whether this variation can explain shifts in firm performance. Using longitudinal data, we find large and...

Using data that permit a distinction between flows of workers, directly measured, and job creation and destruction, again, directly measured, we develop employment and job flow statistics for a representative sample of French establishments for 1987 to 1990. Annual job creation can be...

The neoclassical model of the production function, as applied by Robert Solow to build the neoclassical model of growth, linked labour and capital to output. More recently, Romer and others have expanded the model to include measures of knowledge capital. In this Paper we introduce a new factor,...

There has been considerable controversy over the apparent slowdown in productivity growth in Britain and in other industrial countries over 1971-80 and the apparent speed up in at least British productivity growth over 1980-83. This paper throws light on these matters by means of an aggregate...

Since the early 1980s, the role and general perception of entrepreneurship and start-up activities has changed drastically. In this paper, we investigate what determines regions’ entrepreneurial behaviour and the impact of it on regional economic performance. We argue that economic knowledge...

Does Islamic terrorism have an effect on the general attitudes towards Muslim minorities? We use the murder of Theo van Gogh as an event study to address this question. Specifically, we use the hedonic-market model and test for an effect on listed house prices in neighbourhoods where more than...

We study the recent evolution of top incomes in Switzerland, analyzing both social security data on labor incomes and tax data on total income. The results show that in the last 20 years, the share of top incomes has risen, and the top 0.01 percent’s share even doubled, putting Switzerland...

From 1770 to 1914, the British Government collected weekly price and quantity data for all types of grain traded in many market towns; these ‘Corn Returns’ were published in the London Gazette. We computerised the data published 1770-1864, totalling around 6 million data points. Here we...

This paper provides concordance procedures for product-level trade and production data in the EU and examines the implications of changing product classifications on measured product adding and dropping at Belgian firms. Using the algorithms developed by Pierce and Schott (2012a,b), the paper...