In this paper, I analyse how the survival of new firms is affected by the average ability level in the founding team, the team size, team members' homogeneity with respect to ability, and team members' heterogeneity with respect to education. As a theoretical basis, I apply the O-ring theory...

The rapid diffusion of open source software (OSS), the significant investments observed in OSS projects, and the new inter-firm collaborative possibilities enabled by such OSS projects have generated a substantial literature on the economics of OSS development. However, this literature mainly...

This paper empirically studies the impact of the adoption of open source software (OSS) on firms' labor productivity and innovative behavior. Using a representative sample of German firms, the results show that the adoption of OSS operating systems for servers and general OSS applications has no...

There remains considerable scholarly debate about the role that prior entrepreneurial experience plays in new venture survival. Drawing on entrepreneurial learning theories, we use panel data on 8,400 new ventures to investigate the impact of four different types of prior entrepreneurial...

The Mannheim Enterprise Panel (Mannheimer Unternehmenspanel – MUP) of the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) is the most comprehensive micro database of companies in Germany outside the official business register (which is not accessible to the public). The MUP is based on the firm...