The extent of beta- and sigma-convergence of average labor productivity across manufacturing industries in 18 OECD-countries over the period 1972-1992 show large inter-industry differences. One reason for these differences is knowledge and capital barriers preventing catch-up to occur. We find...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a series of articles on the links between innovation, the evolution of industry and employment. These relations provide the building blocks of a new industrial policy. The articles are included in Innovation, Industry Evolution and Employment published...

This paper studies differences in the rate of self-employment (business ownership) in more than twenty Western nations and Japan for the period 1974-1994, focusing in particular on the influences of dissatisfaction and uncertainty avoidance. We test two types of hypotheses, pertaining to the...

Recent studies show that the likelihood of survival differs significantly across firms. Both firm and industry characteristics are hypothesized to account for this heterogenity. Using a longitudinal database of manufacturing firms we investigate whether firm or industry characteristics dominate....

We investigate which countries have the highest potential to achieve entrepreneurial progress. This progress is defined using an entrepreneurial ladder with five successive steps: “never thought about starting a business”, “thinking about starting a business”, “taking steps to start a...

Total factor productivity of twenty OECD countries for a recent period (1971-2002) is explained using six different models based on the established literature. Traditionally, entrepreneurship is not dealt with in these models. In the present paper it is shown that – when this variable is added...

Education is argued to be an important driver of the decision to start a business. The measurement of its influence, however, is difficult since it is considered to be an endogenous variable. This study accounts for this endogeneity by using an instrumental variables approach

This paper conducts the first general equilibrium analysis of the role of entry, exit and profits in industry dynamics. The benefit of our model is twofold. First, to discriminate between entrants’ role of performing the entrepreneurial function of creating disequilibrium and the conventional...

The validity of family background variables instrumenting education in income regressions has been much criticized. In this paper, we use data of the 2004 German Socio-Economic Panel and Bayesian analysis in order to analyze to what degree violations of the strong validity assumption affect the...

This paper revisits the two-equation model of Carree, van Stel, Thurik and Wennekers (2002) where deviations from the ‘equilibrium’ rate of business ownership play a central role determining both the growth of business ownership and that of economic development. Two extensions of the...