Recent empirical research has found that the effect of new business formation on employment emerges over a period of about ten years and has identified a 'wave' pattern of these effects. In this study, we decompose the overall contribution of new business formation on employment change into...

Self-efficacy, which can be defined as optimism about one's own ability to exercise required actions, has received a lot of attention in research on entrepreneurs' and managers' decision making. This attention led to the development of corresponding measurement instruments. However, there is no...

The purpose of this paper is to test the possible catalysing role of in-house R+D in fostering the complementarity of innovative inputs on a sample of 3045 manufacturing firms drawn from the third Italian Community Innovation Survey (1998-2000). The interactions between four different sources of...

Economic theory has evolved without paying proper attention to behavioral approaches, especially to social, economic, and cognitive psychology. This has recently changed by including behavioral economics courses in many doctoral study programs. Although this new development is most welcome, the...

Economic behavior strives for efficiency. Therefore, also evolving network structures should be a result of such a goal-oriented behavior. Traditionally, networks were assumed to be only temporary phenomena, since the prevailing organizational forms that comply with the efficiency postulate are...

Costly signaling of commitment to a group has been proposed as an explanation for participation in religion and ritual. But if the signal's cost is too small, freeriders will send the signal and behave selflshly later. Effective signaling may then be prohibitively costly. If the average level of...

Institutional settings and the resulting incentive structures are crucial for economic development. The type of entrepreneurial activity and the entrepreneurial effort are especially dependent on underlying incentive structures. We argue that institutions with better incentive structures for...

This paper investigates the impact of implicit institutions on the decision to become an entrepreneur. Implicit institutions are here defined as mindsets that have developed as the result of norms and traditions and we expect they will have an influence on risk attitudes and opportunity...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the effects of knowledge management on the innovation success of firms in Germany. Using a matching procedure on data from the German Innovation Survey of 2003 ("Mannheim Innovation Panel"), we pair firms applying knowledge management with twin firms with...

Using survey data from the International Social Survey Program, we investigate how individual preferences for redistribution and public spending are affected by gender, income and expected future living standard. Applying the concept of the equivalence income, we find that some respondents...