We investigate whether people become more willingly self-employed during boom periods or in recessions and to what extent it is the business cycle or the employment status influencing entry rates into entrepreneurship. Our analysis for Germany reveals that start-up activities are positively...

There is a research gap with respect to understanding the role of entrepreneurial culture and tradition for actual start-up behaviour. We combine historical self-employment data (entrepreneurial tradition) with a psychological measure for entrepreneurial attitudes (entrepreneurial culture). The...

Based on representative micro data for Germany, we compare the incomes of self-employed with those of wage workers. Our results show that the median self-employed entrepreneur with employees earns significantly more than the median salaried employee, while the median solo entrepreneur earns...

We use the historical self-employment rate as an indicator of a regional culture of entrepreneurship and link this measure to economic growth in recent periods. The results indicate that German regions with a high level of entrepreneurship in the mid- 1920s have higher start-up rates about 80...

We explore the role of different types of self-employment for a persistence of the regional level of entrepreneurship over time. Our analysis for West German regions shows relatively strong effects for the historical self- employment rate in the non-agricultural sector, particularly in...

We describe and analyze the long-term development of self-employment in German regions between 1895 and 2019. Based on rankings ("league tables") for the two years we identify those regions where the relative level of self-employment significantly increased ('leapfroggers'), and those where the...

We investigate the effect of broad personality traits' - the Big Five - on an individua's decision to become self-employed. In particular, we test an overall indicator of the entrepreneurial personality. Since we find that the level of self-employment varies considerably across professions, we...

We investigate the relationship between cultural creativity and entrepreneurship in two respects: first, cultural and personal creativity as a characteristic of self-employed individuals; second, selfemployment in professions that can be classified as belonging to the "Creative Class" as...