Starting a firm with expansive potential is an option for educated and high-skilled workers. If there are labor market frictions, this additional option can be seen as reducing the chances of ending up in a low-wage job and hence as increasing the incentives for education. In a matching model,...

Starting a firm with expansive potential is an option for educated and high-skilled workers. This option serves as an insurance against unemployment caused by labour market frictions and hence increases the incentives for education. We show within a matching model that reducing the start-up...

Starting a firm with expansive potential is an option for educated and high-skilled workers. This option serves as an insurance against unemployment caused by labor market frictions and hence increases the incentives for education. We show within a matching model that reducing the start-up costs...

We propose an endogenous growth model, that incorporates both an individual and a communal aspect of Social Capital. In our model, output increases with the stock of business contacts (Relational Capital as one aspect of Social Capital). The modelling of contact creation is based on matching...

Old elites can block changes, but not all do. Why is it that stronger elites may allow more changes than weaker elites? Why do economies with larger stocks of natural resources not grow faster than economies poorer in natural resources? We argue that old elites hold some power to extract rents...

Contacts and the way they are organized in di¤erent economic systemsmatter for the economy. In this paper we introduce the notion of Relational Capital to model contacts. Contacts are an input into sold output in our macro model based on matching theory (Pissarides, 1990). We argue that the...

This paper provides an analytical framework to capture the economic importance of social capital for growth and innovation. Relational Capital (RC) consists of contacts between economic necessary to acquire inputs and to sell outputs units. These contacts form the individual aspect of social...

This paper develops a conceptual framework for the role of social capital in the political economy of innovation, growth and reform, with illustrations from developing and transition countries. It identifies separate but related roles for the individual and communal interpretations of social...

In this article we propose a two stage procedure to model demand decisions by customers who are balancing several dimensions of a product. We then test our procedure by analyzing the behavior of buyers from an Austrian price comparison site. Although in such a market a consumer will typically...