This paper examines the role of venture capital on a firm's innovation activities by using a data set of German technology-based firms founded between 1996 and 2005. Innovation is proxied by patent counts and an index of innovativeness which reflects the degree to which a young firm has...

Nachdem die Anzahl der Unternehmensgründungen insgesamt in den vergangenen Jahren zurückgegangen war, zeigte sich seit 2002 wieder eine Erholung. Die Anzahl der wissens- und technologieintensiven Gründungen folgte 2003 erstmals der allgemeinen Erholungstendenz. Die Anzahl wissensintensiver...

We present evidence on venture capitalists' (VCs) impact on turnover of executives for a sample of nearly 47,000 German high-tech start-ups between 1995 and 2004. We confirm that the presence of VCs increases the probability of a change in the initial executive team. Additionally, we take a...

Viele unternehmerische Entscheidungen werden durch konjunkturelle Schwankungen beeinflusst. Gerade Innovationsentscheidungen können oft kurzfristigen Anpassungsprozessen unterliegen. Das Thema ist aktuell wieder von besonderem Interesse, da sich einerseits ein erneuter konjunktureller Abschwung...

Barriers to entry are regarded as major impediments to the working of markets. Entry must not necessarily actually take place - the perceived threat of entry may encourage incumbent firms to behave as if they are in a competitive market, even if they are not. We present empirical evidence on...

Theory predicts a positive relationship between market concentration and profitability in most scenarios. In empirical work, however, this relation is frequently not found or only a weak connection is observed. We compare the performance of concentration and market share variables, which are...

This paper presents a theoretical and empirical investigation of the two basic effects of patenting: the positive effect of temporarily mitigating competition, and the negative effect of mandatory disclosure of a patent application. Providing empirical evidence for the presented theoretical...

The sensitivity of innovation activities with respect to the business cycle is often assumed to be small. In this paper the hypothesis on cyclical dependence of innovation activities is tested for firms in the German manufacturing, and additionally for SMEs. To this end firms' innovation...

This paper investigates whether the local infrastructure favours entrepreneurial activities. Besides the physical and knowledge infrastructure we take into account a county's broadband availability by building an index which accounts for county-related specificities. We find that broadband...