Are college dropouts successful entrepreneurs? Other than anecdotal evidence on illustrious college dropouts who managed to become self-made billionaires, there is only limited empirical evidence to answer this question. This paper addresses this issue by investigating the relationship between...

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...

A robust relationship between subjective well-being and mortality has been established in the literature. While this relationship has been confirmed for many measures and data sets, few studies address how it is affected by concrete diseases. In this paper we assess for the British Household...

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...

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...

Survey data for a large sample of recent graduates from 37 German universities are used to study labor market outcomes of highly skilled young women and immigrants. Our results indicate a systemic wage gap for women, but not for male immigrants. We find no evidence that female immigrants suffer...

We examine ownership patterns of German university-invented patents before and after the abolition of the "professors' privilege" in 2002 to explore how the legal change affected patenting activities. Our data show a shift from individually-owned and firm-owned patents to university-owned...

We analyze the emergence and spatial evolution of the German laser systems industry. Regional knowledge in the related field of laser sources, as well as the presence of universities with physics or engineering departments, is conducive to the emergence of laser systems suppliers. The regional...

Beginning in 1922, the rate of exit of U.S. tire producers increased sharply and the industry began a severe and protracted shakeout. Just five years earlier, the tire industry experienced a surge in entry that led to a rise of over 80% in the number of producers. We propose an explanation for...