We explore the regional co-evolution of firm population size, private-sector patenting and public research in the empirical context of German laser research and manufacturing over more than 40 years from the emergence of the industry to the mid-2000s. Our qualitative as well as quantitative...

It has long been argued that geographic co-location supports knowledge spillovers. More recently, this argument has been challenged by showing that knowledge spillovers mainly flow through social networks, which may or may not be localized at various geographic scales. We further scrutinize the...

During its early and formative years, the U.S. tire industry was heavily concentrated around Akron, Ohio. We test the extent to which entrants in Ohio were attracted to the Akron area by agglomeration benefits, contributing to a self-reinforcing process envisioned in many modern theories of...

Scientific management is the label Frederick Taylor attached to the system of management devised by him. In this article we present our discovery of very different scientific management principles that were developed roughly concurrently with Taylorism by German physicist Ernst Abbe, then owner...

Summary We trace individual-level learning and knowledge transfer in public research by matching about 5,000 doctoral dissertations and their advisors over the full history of German laser research. We study the number of laser-related dissertations per advisor, publication and patent outputs of...

We study location choices and firm performance in the German machine tool industry, focusing on the forced migration of East German firms after World War II. Our analysis of location choices supports earlier findings that industry agglomerations attract further entrants. Relocating firms...

Necessity spin-offs are organized by employees of incumbent firms to escape deteriorating job conditions. This paper proposes a conceptual model of the spin-off process. Necessity spin-offs are distinguished from opportunity spin-offs on the basis of their triggering events. An empirical...

We use new data on the location and background of entrants into the U.S. tire industry to analyze the factors that caused the industry to be so regionally concentrated around Akron, Ohio, a small city with no particular advantages for tire production. We analyze the states where firms entered...

This article studies entrepreneurial activities emerging out of one of Germany's most prominent dot.com firms: Intershop, a maker of e-commerce software. We show that Intershop spawned at least 30 spin-offs. The majority entered locally, giving rise to a small but growing software cluster and...