What makes the entrepreneurial personality is the key question we seek to answer in thespecial issue of the Journal of Economic Psychology on “Personality and Entrepreneurship”.The contributions are clustered around questions regarding the linkage between personality,socio-economic factors...

Experimental evidence reveals that there is a strong willingness to trust and to act in bothpositively and negatively reciprocal ways. So far it is rarely analyzed whether these variablesof social cognition influence everyday decision making behavior. We focus on entrepreneurswho are permanently...

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,...

This paper investigates whether self-employed households use consumer loans – inparticular instalment loans and overdrafts – to finance business activities. Controlling forfinancial and non-financial household variables we show that self-employed householdsparticularly use personal...

Fostering and supporting start-up businesses by unemployed persons has become anincreasingly important issue in many European countries. These new ventures are beingsupported by various governmental programs. Potential benefits include not only the end ofunemployment for the new entrepreneur but...

Support schemes for unemployed aiming for self-employment have been recently reformedseveral times. In 2003, the start-up subsidy was added to the existing bridging allowance...

This paper empirically analyzes whether the character-based approach, which is based onthe personality structure and the human capital of business founders, allows prediction ofentrepreneurial success...

In this paper we investigate the status quo of regulation for Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) inGermany. A short presentation of the legal framework is followed by a detailed account of thepractical implications for the lending design that MFIs face. Five different models of loan extensionare...

In this paper we empirically examine the impact of competition between Microfinance Institutions(MFIs) on the efficacy of loan contracts when the MFIs make use of joint liability loan contracts. Morespecifically, we aim to find out whether competition will reduce the power of the self-selection...

We assess the experiences of Eastern European Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) in order to deriverecommendations for their Western European counterparts. In particular, six dimensions arediscussed: (1) building a supportive stakeholder environment, (2) defining a marketing strategy, (3)using...