This paper investigates the impact of implicit institutions on the decision to become an entrepreneur. Implicit institutions are here defined as mindsets that have developed as the result of norms and traditions and we expect they will have an influence on risk attitudes and opportunity...

Streiks in der Luftfahrt und bei der Deutschen Bahn haben in jüngster Vergangenheit zu großem Unmut in der Bevölkerung geführt. Denn Streiks in diesen Verkehrsunternehmen der Daseinsvorsorge betreffen nicht nur die bestreikten Unternehmen selbst, sondern große Teile der Gesellschaft. In...

Streiks in der Luftfahrt und bei der Deutschen Bahn haben in jüngster Vergangenheit zu großem Unmut in der Bevölkerung geführt. Denn Streiks in diesen Verkehrsunternehmen der Daseinsvorsorge betreffen nicht nur die bestreikten Unternehmen selbst, sondern große Teile der Gesellschaft. In...

Public child care is expected to assist families in reconciling work with family life. Yet, empirical evidence for the relevance of public child care to maternal employment is inconclusive. We exploit the introduction of a legal claim to a place in kindergarten in Germany, which was contingent...

Many governments have banned strikes in public transportation. Whether this can be justified depends on whether strikes endanger public safety or health. We use time-series and cross-sectional variation in powerful registry data to quantify the effects of public transit strikes on urban...

We document the spatial diffusion of Friedrich Froebel’s radical invention of kindergartens in 19th-century Germany. The first kindergarten was founded at Froebel’s birthplace. Early spatial diffusion can be explained by cultural proximity, measured by historical dialect similarity, to...

We document the spatial diffusion of Friedrich Froebel’s radical invention of kindergartens in 19th-century Germany. The first kindergarten was founded at Froebel’s birthplace. Early spatial diffusion can be explained by cultural proximity, measured by historical dialect similarity, to...

Research analyzing the importance of human capital for innovation usually focuses on secondary and tertiary education. This paper takes a different perspective by focusing on in-firm training. We argue that continuous training guarantees access to leading-edge knowledge and thus increases a...

We investigate the effect of social capital access on entrepreneurship. Social capital helps entrepreneurs to overcome resource constraints. This is especially important in small communities where we often see a lack of market-oriented institutions such as venture capital firms. Entrepreneurs...

What role does affordable and widely available public child care play for fertility? We exploit a major German reform generating large temporal and spatial variation in child care coverage for children under the age of three. Our precise and robust estimates on birth register data reveal that...