The number of start-ups in Germany has been at a historically low level for a decade. While there was an annual average of 240,000 new start-ups between 1995 and 2004, the number has fallen significantly in the following years to around 165,000. One explanation is demographic change, but another...

In a relatively recent paper, Gehrig and Stenbacka (Eur Econ Rev 51, 77–99, 2007) show that information sharing increases banks’ profits to the detriment of creditworthy entrepreneurs in a model of a banking duopoly with switching costs and poaching. They restrict their analysis to the case...