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...

We investigate the persistence of levels of self-employment and new business formation in different time periods and under different framework conditions. The analysis shows that high levels of regional self-employment and new business formation tend to be persistent for periods as long as 80...

The discussion on regional innovation systems emphasizes the duality of local and global links. While the former enable effective knowledge exchange between regional actors, the latter are considered to provide regional systems with knowledge diverse to their knowledge base. Our empirical...

This paper investigates the geography and the effect of people in creative oc-cupation 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 and rural regions may also have a considerable proportion of...

We assess the efficiency of regional innovation systems (RIS) in Germany by means of a knowledge production function. This function relates private sector research and development (R&D) activity in a region to the number of inventions that have been registered by residents of that region....

Innovation processes are characterized by a pronounced division of labor between actors. Two types of externality may arise from such interactions. On the one hand, a close location of actors affiliated to the same industry may stimulate innovation (MAR externalities). On the other hand, new...

This paper is concerned with the relationship between innovative success of entrepreneurs and their prior knowledge at the stage of firm formation. We distinguish between different kinds of experience an entrepreneur can possess and find evidence that the innovative success subsequent to firm...

In this paper we investigate the determinants of cooperative innovation and put our main focus on the regional or spatial and on the technological or sectoral dimension. We suggest a method to disentangle these two factors and to extract differential regional effects. The latter can be used to...

We analyze information and knowledge transfer in a sample of 16 German regional innovation networks with almost 300 firms and research organizations involved. The results indicate that strong ties are more beneficial for the exchange of knowledge and information than weak ties. Moreover, our...

This work deals with the determinants of cooperative invention and innovation within innovation systems. Several proximity dimensions are used to identify the levels on which systemic innovation activities can be observed. To disentangle the effects of different proximity dimensions a procedure...