We study market ine¢ ciencies and policy remedies when agents choose their occupations, and entrepreneurial talent is subject to private information. Untalented entrepreneurs depress the returns to entrepreneurship because of adverse selection. The severity of this problem depends on the outside option of entrepreneurs, which is working for wages. This links credit, product and labour markets. ...

Bridging ties are important for obtaining new information. However, when entrepreneurs try to bridge between two networks, they may face problems due to the variety of knowledge among individuals in both networks. In this paper, we argue that specific human capital is essential for interpreting new information and coordinating action when bridging between networks. In a sample of 70 Dutch acade...

Private sector research and development (R&D) in food processing has seen a growing share of agricultural R&D. This paper analyzes market and technological links between farmer-entrepreneurs and food processing firms. It is shown that processing sector R&D tends to display explosive cycles. To avoid explosive cycles, the processing sector sets the R&D growth path and its target. Dynamic adjustm...

Interest in the role of entrepreneurial entry in innovation raises the question about the extent to which tax policy encourages or discourages entry. We find that, while the level of the marginal tax rate has a negative effect on entrepreneurial entry, the progressivity of the tax also discourages entrepreneurship, and signiiicantly so for some groups of households. These effects are traceable ...

This study focuses on the role of entrepreneurs in the private sector in sub-Saharan Africa. Using data from the Regional Program on Enterprise Development (RPED) and controlling for various factors, our analysis compares growth rates of indigenously owned African firms with firms owned by entrepreneurs of Asian or European descent, in Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania. We find that after c...

Members of the current generation of young children have been exposed to technological informants, primarily consisting of devices that search the Internet for information, nearly since birth. However, little is known about how young children explore information using these digital sources. To address this issue, 30 preschool children generated questions about unfamiliar animals that were to be...

Promising small-scale wood pellet heating systems with sizable market potentials have started to penetrate the residential heating market in Europe and elsewhere. Despite significant technological progress, cost reduction, improved convenience and reliability, and reduced environmental impact, diffusion of such systems will nonetheless take time. Framework and market conditions, and especially ...

Entrepreneurs play an elemental role in bringing new technologies to market. As technologies are often configurable to serve customers in a variety of different markets, entrepreneurs can identify multiple market opportunities prior to the first market entry of their emerging firms, and may thus have a choice of which market to enter first. The empirical results presented in this paper offer tw...