Using longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the German Socio-Economic Panel, this research compares pathways into self-employment among men and women in the United States and Western Germany. Academic and vocational credentials are more important for stabilizing self-employment in the United States than in Germany, where the lack of credentials is a significant deterrent to ...
Reliable information on small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is rare and costly for financial intermediaries. Therefore relationship banking is often considered as the appropriate lending technique. In this paper we offer a theoretical model to analyze relationship banking and the pricing behavior of banks in a Bertrand competition framework with monitoring costs. We show that the lack of reliable ...
Firms in socialist and transitional economies are often obliged to provide social goods at the same time that they are competing with private firms. This paper analyzes the impact of such bundling on the provision of private and social goods focussing on the inability of politicians to commit not to bail out firms experiencing financial trouble. This soft budget constraint problem results in firms ...
Economically active people are either in gainful employment, are unemployed or self-employed. We are interested in the dynamics of the transitions between these states across the business cycle. It is generally perceived that employment or self-employment are absorbing states. However, innovations, structural changes and business cycles generate strong adjustment processes that lead to fluctuations ...