Many start-ups chose to compete with incumbent firms using one of two generic strategies: cost leadership or differentiation. Our study demonstrates how this choice depends on whether the startup was founded out of necessity. Our results, based on a representative data set of 4,568 German...

We employ agency theory to argue that the effects of family (and founder) ownership vs. management will be quite different: the former is expected to contribute positively to performance, the latter is argued to erode performance. Previous studies, due to problems of multicollinearity have been...

Support of business start-ups is partially motivated by social policy objectives. The paper discusses these social policy objectives on a conceptual and empirical basis. Its focus is on start-ups out of unemployment. Implications for the design and the evaluation of socially motivated start-up...

Corporate income taxation influences the quantity and type of entrepreneurship, which in turn affects economic development. Empirical evidence shows that higher corporate income tax rates reduce business density and entrepreneurship entry rates and increase the capital size of new firms. The...