Publishing entrepreneurship research is not just important but challenging. Longstanding experts in the field can provide helpful advice. As borders between academic fields blur, research fields are increasingly global in their perspective, knowledge, and findings, thus enabling robust participation in research fields at a scale previously unimaginable. Drawing on the experience, insights, and perspectives ...
The 2D: 4D digit ratio, the ratio of the length of the second finger to the length of the fourth finger, is often considered a proxy for testosterone exposure in utero. A recent study reported, among other things, an association between the left-hand 2D:4D and self-employment in a sample of 974 adults. In this preregistered study, we replicate the 2D:4D results on a sample of more than 2100 adults ...
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 ...
Innovation has recently come to the attention of Antitrust Authorities, even though the effect of mergers on innovation is still hotly debated. I study how the activity of Antitrust Authorities impacts future innovation of merging firms. Exploiting a change in notification rules I build an event study comparing mergers notified to the authorities with non-notified ones. I develop a new methodology...
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. ...
Theory suggests that large firms are more likely to engage in lobbying behaviour and are geographically more mobile compared with smaller entities. Conditional on jurisdiction size, policy choices are thus predicted to depend on the shape of a jurisdiction's firm size distribution, with more business-oriented policies being enacted if jurisdictions host large firms. The paper empirically tests this ...
Many industries are seeing an increase in concentration, leading to a discussion on the effectiveness of horizontal merger enforcement. The policy debate shows that one of the key arguments put forward when supporting potential mergers is the possibility of realization of merger efficiency gains, specifically in the transport industry. Yet, there exists little empirical evidence on the actual effects ...
This paper contributes to the debate on the internationalization of the R&D activity of multinational enterprises (MNEs). Specifically, we examine the following research questions: (1) What are the determinants of the MNEs’ R&D internationalization level? (2) What types of internationalization strategies—home-base-augmenting (HBA), home-base-exploiting (HBE), technology-seeking (TS), and/or market-seeking ...
The existential threat to small businesses, based on their crucial role in the economy, is behind the plethora of scholarly studies in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining the 14 contributions of the special issue on the "Economic Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Entrepreneurship and Small Businesses," the paper comprises four parts: a systematic review of the literature on the ...