This paper discusses the role of so-called national champions within the context of the EU's ambitious goal to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economic region in the world by 2010. We find football to be a useful analogy in our discussion of national champions. There are...

Demographic change will be one of the major challenges for economic policy in the developed world in the next decades. In this article, we analyze the relationship between age structure and the number of startups. We argue that an individual's decision to start a business is determined by his or...

We analyze the effect of industry, region and time on new-business survival rates by means of a multi-dimensional approach. The data relate to West German districts in the 1983-2000 period. The survival chances of start-ups tend to be relatively low in industries characterized by a high minimum...

We analyze the economic effects of a developer’s connectedness in the electronic gameindustry. Knowledge spillovers between developers should be of special relevance in this knowledgebasedindustry. We calculate measures for a developer’s connectedness to other developers atmultiple points in...

Based on representative data, the German Micro-Census, we provide an overview of thedevelopment of self-employment and entrepreneurship in Germany between 1991 and 2010,the first two decades after reunification. We investigate the socioeconomic background ofthese individuals, their education,...

Von der Gründung von Betrieben bzw. Unternehmen können verschiedenar-tige Wirkungen ausgehen. Dabei bildet die Entwicklung der Gründungen selbst nur einen Teil dieser Effekte ab. Wesentlich bedeutender sind in der Regel die indirekten Wirkungen, insbesondere die durch das Auftreten neuer...

Der Beitrag arbeitet die Heterogenität von Unternehmen innerhalb von Branchen hin-sichtlich ihrer technischen Effizienz heraus. Datengrundlage sind die Mikro-Daten der Kostentrukturerhebung im Verarbeitenden Gewerbe in Deutschland. Die technische Effizienz wird im Rahmen der Schätzung einer...

Der Beitrag behandelt die wissenschaftlichen Diskussion um die Beeinflussung regionaler Innovationsbedingungen, die mit dem von Hans-Jürgen Ewers und Ko-autoren entworfenen Konzept der innovationsorientierten Regionalpolitik ange-stoßen wurde. Zwar haben sich viele der dem Konzept der...

The traditional approach to measuring allocative efficiency is based on input prices, which are rarely known at the firm level. This paper proposes a new approach to measure allocative efficiency which is based on the output-oriented distance to the frontier in a profit technical efficiency...

We examine the role of spatial proximity for Venture Capital (VC) investments inGermany. The main database is a survey of 85 personal interviews withrepresentatives of different types of financial institutions. The analysis shows thatspatial proximity is far less important for VC investments...