Innovative Firms or Innovative Owners? Determinants of Innovation in Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises Innovation is key to technology adoption and creation, and to explaining the vast differences in productivity across and within countries. Despite the central role of the entrepreneur in the innovation process, data limitations have restricted standard analysis of the determinants of innova...

This paper is a reflection of the author’s views on recent research developments at the interface of entrepreneurship and regional economic development and growth. The paper begins with an overview of the recent rise of interest in entrepreneurship in general and, in particular, with respect to its influence on regional economic growth and development. Following an introduction the formation an...

This article explores the pattern and breadth of collaboration activities of innovating firms active in renewable energy (RE), and the impact of collaboration on firm-level innovation performance. We deploy a unique dataset from a special section of the 2014 CIS survey in Denmark, in which we included questions that enable us to unambiguously identify RE innovators. In a quantitative analysis, ...

Innovation can play an important role in helping transition economies accelerate their development towards a competitive market economy. Alternative theoretical perspectives, however, suggest contrasting views of the innovative potential of transition economies, and the relative importance of innovation in existing and new firms. Here, we draw on the knowledge spillovers model of entrepreneursh...

Searching for the Entrepreneurial Personality: New Evidence and Avenues for Further Research What makes the entrepreneurial personality is the key question we seek to answer in the special issue of the Journal of Economic Psychology on “Personality and Entrepreneurship”. The contributions are clustered around questions regarding the linkage between personality, socio-economic factors and entrep...

Defending Gibrat’s Law as a Long-Run Regularity According to Gibrat’s Law of Proportionate Effect, the growth rate of a given firm is independent of its size at the beginning of the period examined. While earlier studies tended to confirm the Law, more recent research generally rejects it. This paper reconciles these two streams of literature, taking into account the role of market selection an...

Ethnic Diversity and Team Performance: A Field Experiment One of the most salient and relevant dimensions of team heterogeneity is ethnicity. We measure the causal impact of ethnic diversity on the performance of business teams using a randomized field experiment. We follow 550 students who set up 45 real companies as part of their curriculum in an international business program in the Netherla...

Who Values the Status of the Entrepreneur? Parker and Van Praag (2009) showed, based on theory, that the group status of the profession ‘entrepreneurship’ shapes people’s occupational preferences and thus their choice behavior. The current study focuses on the determinants and consequences of the group status of a profession, entrepreneurship in particular. If the group status of entrepreneursh...

This paper addresses the issue if and to what extent young firms differ from incumbents regarding the use of non-standard employment, trust-based working time arrangements and overtime hours in the light of the qualitative changes of employment structures that are taking place in industrialized countries, such as rising shares of non-standard employment and borders between work and private life...

We use a randomized controlled trial to demonstrate that inexperienced female microenterprise owners in a Kenyan slum benefit from mentorship by an experienced entrepreneur in the same community. Using seven rounds of surveys, we find that mentorship increased profits by 20% relative to control. We conduct a formal business education intervention, which has no effect on profits despite changes ...