The decision to become an entrepreneur is in essence an individual decision. But even when the endowments of inhabitants are taken into account, some regions have persistently higher entrepreneurship rates than others. Proposed explanations for this regional variation are numerous: market...

Transformation to post-industrial or knowledge-based economies causes changes in the structure of labour markets with growing demand on highly-qualified workforce. In XXI century human capital has become one of the most important production factors determining competitiveness and innovativeness...

This paper examines the role that human capital plays in firm?s strategic decisions. It focuses on long-distance corporate relocations which present certain trade-offs in terms of human capital and modifies firms? relationship with the labour force. It is assessed to what extent having (an...

We investigate the impact of start-up rates on regional economic development. We argue that in line with Schumpeter's view this effect is mediated by a process of creative destruc-tion: Start-ups spark a process of creative destruction which in turn leads to regional eco-nomic development....

In this paper, I analyse how the survival of new firms is affected by the average ability level in the founding team, the team size, team members' homogeneity with respect to ability, and team members' heterogeneity with respect to education. As a theoretical basis, I apply the O-ring theory...

Universities are increasingly seen as engines for regional innovation and economic growth. Some famous high-tech regions have developed on the basis of universities, for example Silicon Valley in California, Greater Boston in Massachusetts, or the Research Triangle in North Carolina. In these...

Recent research based on aggregate data suggests that employment in young firms is more negatively impacted during economic crises than employment in incumbent firms. Using firm-level data, we show that under constant human capital of the firms' founders, employment growth in less than 1...

Age is an important factor in entrepreneurship. The paths into entrepreneurship at a later age may be varied. Self-employment in later life may be either a form of partial retirement or a career option. Older individuals may also be pushed into self-employment. The focus of this paper is on the...

I exploit the amendment to the German Trade and Crafts Code in 2004 as a natural experiment to asses the causal effects of this reform on the probabilities of being self-employed and of transition into and out of self-employment using repeated cross sections (2002-2006) of German Microcensus...

Background and motivation: The paper investigates what effects the colocation of growing and declining sectors has on the hiring behaviour of growing sectors in terms of labour pooling and employment growth. Given the importance of geographical proximity in labour matches, the agglomeration...