|
on Entrepreneurship |
|
Issue of 2014‒02‒15
nine papers chosen by Marcus Dejardin University of Namur and Universite' Catholique de Louvain |
| By: | William R. Kerr (University, NBER, and Bank of Finland.) |
| Abstract: | High-skilled immigrants are a very important component of U.S. innovation and entrepreneurship. Immigrants account for roughly a quarter of U.S. workers in these fields, and they have a similar contribution in terms of output measures like patents or firm starts. This contribution has been rapidly growing over the last three decades. In terms of quality, the average skilled immigrant appears to be better trained to work in these fields, but conditional on educational attainment of comparable quality to natives. The exception to this is that immigrants have a disproportionate impact among the very highest achievers (e.g., Nobel Prize winners). Studies regarding the impact of immigrants on natives tend to find limited consequences in the short-run, while the results in the long-run are more varied and much less certain. Immigrants in the United States aid business and technology exchanges with their home countries, but the overall effect that the migration has on the home country remains unclear. We know very little about return migration of workers engaged in innovation and entrepreneurship, except that it is rapidly growing in importance. |
| Keywords: | Immigration, innovation, entrepreneurship, diaspora |
| JEL: | F15 F22 J15 J31 J44 L14 L26 O31 O32 O33 |
| Date: | 2014–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wip:wpaper:16&r=ent |
| By: | Nunziata, Luca; Rocco, Lorenzo |
| Abstract: | We propose a new methodology for identifying the causal effect of Protestantism versus Catholicism on the decision to become an entrepreneur. Our quasi-experimental research design exploits religious minorities' strong attachment to religious ethics and the exogenous historical determination of religious minorities' geographical distribution in the regions of the former Holy Roman Empire in the 1500s. We analyse European Social Survey data, collected in four waves between 2002 and 2008, and find that religious background has a significant effect on the individual propensity for entrepreneurship, with Protestantism increasing the probability to be an entrepreneur by around 5 percentage points with respect to Catholicism. Our findings are stable across a number of robustness checks, including accounting for migration patterns and a placebo test. We also provide an extended discussion of the assumptions' validity at the basis of our research design. This paper is one of the first attempts to identify a causal effect, rather than a simple correlation, of religious ethics on economic outcomes. |
| Keywords: | Entrepreneurship, Religion, Culture, Protestantism, Catholicism. |
| JEL: | J21 J24 Z12 Z13 |
| Date: | 2014–02–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:53566&r=ent |
| By: | Dohse, Dirk; Ott, Ingrid |
| Abstract: | This paper analyzes the impact of different individual skills and their economywide distribution among heterogenous entrepreneurs on a country's catching upprocess to the world technology frontier (WTF). Highly skilled entrepreneurs qualify as either technological specialists or as broadly skilled systemic entrepreneurs. Governmental policy may address individual skills or the aggregate composition of skills in society and may be interpreted as education policy. The effectiveness of alternative growth-promoting policies is shown to depend on the relationship between a country's state of development and the prevailing composition of entrepreneurs. Countries far from the WTF benefit from increasing the share of technological specialists, whereas countries close to the WTF benefit from increasing the share of broadly skilled systemic entrepreneurs. -- |
| Keywords: | heterogenous skills,Schumpeterian growth,catching up,education policies,systemic capacity |
| JEL: | O40 O30 I25 |
| Date: | 2014 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:kitwps:55&r=ent |
| By: | Leonardo Iacovone, Vijaya Ramachandran, and Martin Schmidt |
| Abstract: | Many countries in Africa suffer high rates of underemployment or low rates of productive employment; many also anticipate large numbers of people to enter the workforce in the near future. This paper asks the question: Are African firms creating fewer jobs than those located in other parts of the world? And, if so, why? One reason may be that weak business environments slow the growth of firms and distort the allocation of resources away from better-performing firms, hence reducing their potential for job creation. The paper uses data from 41,000 firms across 119 countries to examine the drivers of job creation. We find that African firms, at any age, tend to be 20–24 percent smaller than comparable firms in other regions of the world. The poor business environment, driven by limited access to finance, and the lack of availability of electricity, land, and unskilled labor has some value in explaining this difference. Foreign ownership, the export status of the firm, and the size of the market are also significant determinants of employment levels. However, even after controlling for the business environment and for characteristics of firms and markets, about 60 percent of the size gap between African and non-African firms remains unexplained. Constraints imposed by the business environment and by market characteristics that limit the growth of African firms can be alleviated by policy reforms. But there appear to be constraints that are not captured by these measures--these require further research in order to design appropriate policies for job creation. |
| Keywords: | Africa, underemployment, finance, economic growth |
| JEL: | D22 D24 L2 L25 O12 O14 O55 |
| Date: | 2014–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cgd:wpaper:353&r=ent |
| By: | Mundt, Philipp; Milakovic, Mishael; Alfarano, Simone |
| Abstract: | The basic philosophy behind Gibrat's rule of proportionate effect has been to find some common mechanism in the growth process of business firms, based on the idea that growth rates are independent of size and drawn from the same distribution. After decades of research, however, it seems fair to say that the 'law' fails to provide a universal mechanism for the growth of firms. Here we take the position that it is more plausible for Gibrat's approach to apply to firm profitability rather than firm growth, in line with the classical idea of economic competition as a dynamic process of capital reallocation. Considering a sample of more than five hundred long-lived US corporations from virtually all sectors, we compare the statistical properties of growth and profit rates over a time span of thirty years, and find that profit rates and their volatilities are independent of size, which is not true of growth rates. We also find that the empirical densities of both profitability and growth can be described by exponential power (or Subbotin) distributions, but there are pronounced differences in their parameterizations and autocorrelation structures. We argue that a recently proposed diffusion process not only reproduces the cross-sectional distribution of profit rates, but is also consistent with the empirical time series of individual firms and their autocorrelations. In the natural sciences such a situation is commonly referred to as a statistical equilibrium, while econometricians speak of ergodicity and stationarity. Our economic interpretation of this property is that all surviving firms are subject to the same competitive pressures of capital reallocation, irrespective of their industry or particular line of business. They all face the same profitability benchmark and volatility, while their idiosyncratic efforts merely have an effect on the persistence of abnormal profits. In other words, survivors have to participate in the same game and can only choose to do so at different 'speeds'. We conclude with the empirical observation that the speed of convergence from abnormal profits to the system-wide average depends negatively on firm size, diversification, and capital intensity. -- |
| Keywords: | profit rates,diffusion process,statistical equilibrium,dynamic competition,persistence |
| JEL: | C16 L10 D21 E10 |
| Date: | 2014 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:bamber:92&r=ent |
| By: | Joy Buchanan (Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science and Department of Economics, George Mason University); Bart Wilson (Economic Science Institute, Chapman University) |
| Abstract: | We conduct a laboratory experiment to explore whether the protection of intellectual property (IP) incentivizes people to create non-rivalrous knowledge goods, foregoing the production of other rivalrous goods. In the contrasting treatment with no IP protection, participants are free to resell and remake non-rivalrous knowledge goods originally created by others. We find that creators reap substantial profits when IP is protected and that rampant pirating is common when there is no IP protection, but IP protection in and of itself is neither necessary nor sufficient for generating wealth from the discovery of knowledge goods. Rather, individual entrepreneurship is the key. Length: 36 |
| Keywords: | intellectual property, experimental economics |
| JEL: | C92 D89 K39 |
| Date: | 2014–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gms:wpaper:1044&r=ent |
| By: | Ferreira Filipe, Sara; Grammatikos, Theoharry; Michala, Dimitra |
| Abstract: | In the European Union, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) represent 99% of all businesses and contribute to more than half of the total value-added. In this paper, we develop distress prediction models for SMEs using a dataset from eight European countries over the period 2000-2009. We examine idiosyncratic and systematic covariates and find that the first discriminate between healthy and distressed firms based on their relative level of risk, whereas the second move the overall distress rates. Moreover, SMEs across Europe are vulnerable to the same idiosyncratic factors but systematic factors vary in different regions. Also, micro SMEs are more vulnerable to these systematic factors compared to larger SMEs. The paper contributes to the literature in several ways. First, using a sample with many micro companies, it offers unique insights into the European small business sector. Second, it is the first paper to explore distress in a multi-country setting, allowing for regional comparisons and uncovering regional vulnerabilities. Third, by incorporating systematic dependencies, the models can capture changes in overall distress rates and comovements during economic cycles. |
| Keywords: | credit risk, distress, forecasting, SMEs, discrete time hazard model, multi-period logit model, duration analysis |
| JEL: | C13 C41 C53 G33 |
| Date: | 2014–02–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:53572&r=ent |
| By: | René Bohnsack (University of Amsterdam Business School - University of Amsterdam Business School); Jonatan Pinkse (MTS - Management Technologique et Strategique - Grenoble École de Management (GEM)); Ans Kolk (Amsterdam Business School - University of Amsterdam) |
| Abstract: | Sustainable technologies challenge prevailing business practices, especially in industries that depend heavily on the use of fossil fuels. Firms are therefore in need of business models that transform the specific characteristics of sustainable technologies into new ways to create economic value and overcome the barriers that stand in the way of their market penetration. A key issue is the respective impact of incumbent and entrepreneurial firms' path-dependent behaviour on the development of such new business models. Embedded in the literature on business models, this paper explores how incumbent and entrepreneurial firms' path dependencies have affected the evolution of business models for electric vehicles. Based on a qualitative analysis of electric vehicle projects of key industry players over a five-year period (2006-2010), the paper identifies four business model archetypes and traces their evolution over time. Findings suggest that incumbent and entrepreneurial firms approach business model innovation in distinctive ways. Business model evolution shows a series of incremental changes that introduce service-based components, which were initially developed by entrepreneurial firms, to the product. Over time there seems to be some convergence in the business models of incumbents and entrepreneurs in the direction of delivering economy multi-purpose vehicles. |
| Keywords: | Sustainable technology; business models, evolution; path dependencies; electric vehicles |
| Date: | 2014 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:gemptp:hal-00936886&r=ent |
| By: | Hartmann, Max |
| Abstract: | -- |
| Date: | 2014 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:wuerpm:82014&r=ent |