We investigate the effect of broad personality traits-the Big Five-on an individual's decision to become self- employed. In particular, we test an overall indicator of the entrepreneurial personality. Since we find that the level of self-employment varies considerably across professions, we also...

The paper reviews the approaches that have been followed for analyzing the effect of new business formation on regional development. It begins with an outline of how start-ups may affect regional development. In dealing with different ways of empirically assessing these effects, I particularly...

It has been argued that creativity is an important source of regional growth. This paper investigates the geography of people in creative occupation in Germany. The population share of the creative class as well as of bohemians and artists is relatively high in larger cities, but smaller places...

Drawing on representative household data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we examine the role of an early precursor of entrepreneurial development - parental role models - for the individual decision to become self-employed in the post-unified Germany. The findings suggest that the...