Entrepreneurship Research Group Publications

Access to Digital Finance: Equity Crowdfunding across Countries and Platforms

Financing entrepreneurship spurs innovation and economic growth. Digital financial platforms that crowdfund equity for entrepreneurs have emerged globally, yet they remain poorly understood. We model equity crowdfunding in terms of the relationship between the number of investors and the amount of money raised per pitch. We examine heterogeneity in the average amount raised per pitch that is associated ...

German Financial State Aid during Covid-19 Pandemic: Higher Impact among Digitalized Self-Employed

Does Gender of Firm Ownership Matter? Female Entrepreneurs and the Gender Pay Gap

We examine how the gender of business owners is related to the wages paid to female relative to male employees working in their firms. Using Finnish register data and employing firm fixed effects, we find that the gender pay gap is—starting from a gender pay gap of 11 to 12%—two to three percentage points lower for hourly wages in female-owned firms than in male-owned firms. Results are robust to how ...

Remunicipalization, Corporatization, and Outsourcing: The Performance of Public-Sector Firms after Reorganization

This article investigates the impact of reorganization on productivity within public-sector firms addressing the owners' composition, the board-management relationship, and the management's decision to outsource activities. Considering a large panel of 2,325 German municipally owned utilities between 2003 and 2014, firm-level productivity is estimated based on a control function approach. Contrary ...

A Lasting Crisis Affects R&D Decisions of Smaller Firms: The Greek Experience

We use the prolonged Greek crisis as a case study to understand how a lasting economic shock affects the innovation strategies of firms in economies with moderate innovation activities. Adopting the 3-stage CDM model, we explore the link between R&D, innovation, and productivity for different size groups of Greek manufacturing firms during the prolonged crisis. At the first stage, we find that the ...

Technological Relatedness and Industrial Transformation: Introduction to the Special Issue

This article introduces eleven research articles that connect concepts of technological relatedness and diffusion with the transformation of industrial and innovation systems. These studies focus on the role of knowledge spillovers, regional variations in innovation and performance, and the evolution of new technologies, such as green and digital technologies. Regional capabilities and ability to diversify ...

Pandemic Depression: COVID-19 and the Mental Health of the Self-Employed

We investigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on self-employed people’s mental health. Using representative longitudinal survey data from Germany, we reveal differential effects by gender: whereas self-employed women experienced a substantial deterioration in their mental health, self-employed men displayed no significant changes up to early 2021. Financial losses are important in explaining these ...

Self-Efficacy and Entrepreneurial Performance of Start-Ups

Self-efficacy reflects the self-belief that one can persistently perform difficult and novel tasks while coping with adversity. As such beliefs reflect how individuals behave, think, and act, they are key for successful entrepreneurial activities. While existing literature mainly analyzes the influence of the task-related construct of entrepreneurial self-efficacy, we take a different perspective and ...

The Influence of Start-Up Motivation on Entrepreneurial Performance

Predicting entrepreneurial development based on individual and business-related characteristics is a key objective of entrepreneurship research. In this context, we investigate whether the motives of becoming an entrepreneur influence the subsequent entrepreneurial development. In our analysis, we examine a broad range of business outcomes including survival and income, as well as job creation, and ...

Personality Characteristics and the Decision to Hire

As the policy debate on entrepreneurship increasingly centers on firm growth in terms of job creation, it is important to understand whether the personality of entrepreneurs drives the first hiring in their firms. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we analyze to what extent personality traits influence the probability of becoming an employer. The results indicate that personality matters. ...