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...

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 relationship between individual firms’ export behaviour and firm performance has been studied extensively in the economic literature. However, most studies from the field of economics only distinguish between exporting and non-exporting companies, using the firms’ export status as a...

The choice of the appropriate sales mode belongs to the firm’s most important strategic decisions after entering into a foreign market. Thus, it is important that the selected foreign sales mode best suits a firm’s available resources and capabilities. However, these resources and...

The objective of this study is to perform an ex-post evaluation of the instruments applied in the OP ERDF Saxony 2007-2013 to facilitate SMEs’ growth and innovation. The analysis encompasses 9 instruments that were identified as either targeting SMEs in particular or being mainly absorbed by...

Many studies found that women-owned firms underperform when comparing performance indicators at an aggregate level. The performance gap might be attributed to gender differences in personal and firm characteristics affecting performance. However, previous studies were not able to entirely...