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vorgelegt von: Ibrahim Alkan Zusammenfassung in englischer Sprache Masterarbeit FH Campus Wien 2016

The paper investigates the survival of newly created small and medium enterprises in Brazilian manufacturing taking as reference the 1996-2005 period. The econometric analysis relies on time-varying version of the proportional hazard rate model that controls for unobserved heterogeneity. The evidence mostly corroborates previous findings for developed countries. Salient results include the positive role played by firm size, industry size and industry growth on survival and yet the negative influence exerted by industrial concentration and entry rate.

This paper analyzes how companies of immigrant entrepreneurs in knowledgeintensive industries differ from companies of native entrepreneurs with respect to start-up characteristics, firm survival and innovative performance. I focus on immigrants from the 'recruitment countries' of south and southeast Europe, who arrived in Germany mainly in the 1970s to fill labor shortages. They are the largest immigrant group in Germany and can be reliably identified via ethnic name coding. Immigrant entrepreneurs are less than half as likely to found a company in a knowledge-intensive industry as native entrepreneurs. Firms owned exclusively by immigrants tend to be smaller and have higher exit rates. After controlling for resources, I found no differences in patenting activity compared to firms owned exclusively by natives. Firms in mixed immigrant/native ownership have no size disadvantage. In that group, exit rates are higher in services but not in manufacturing, and, again, there are no differences in patenting when resources are taken into account. The lower participation of immigrant entrepreneurs in knowledge-intensive industries can be explained by lower education levels, while smaller firm sizes suggest more limited access to capital.

In this paper we will look at job creation and destruction in firms. We will answer the question if it is the large companies that create jobs, while the smaller companies are contributing much less. Or is it the young companies that create jobs? And who destroys the most jobs? In the crisis Denmark lost 186,000 jobs in the private sector. The question is where and how could these jobs be recreated. Are these issues specific to industries or are they universal? The data used is register data on workplaces and firms for the period 1980-2007. The base unit of data is the workplace. The company (firm) is the legal entity. A company can have many sites, and one of the ways companies can grow is by expanding with multiple sites. This can happen by mergers and acquisitions but can also happen by creating daughter workplaces. It is therefore essential to look at workplaces and firms at the same time. A complication here is that firms switch ID over time because of change of ownership, mergers and divisions. Data must be corrected so that these administrative issues will not affect the survival of firms. The data are used in a way where we can cover firm birth and firm death, spin-offs and mergers. The analysis will make it possible to differentiate between net and gross creation of jobs because we can follow each single individual in and out of jobs. We have for Denmark found that size on its own does not have a big impact, but young firms are much more likely to contribute to a positive growth. For the U.S. it has been found that the growth in jobs comes from small businesses. A closer analysis though shows that the main factor here is the firm age. Thus, it is found that young firms net create the most jobs, but they are also responsible for the most job destructions.

This paper investigates economic and subjective effects of public business assistance delivered to nascent entrepreneurs in Germany. Employing cluster analysis, we explore the actual scope and intensity of business assistance used. Then we analyze predictors of take-up and perceived usefulness taking into account the different patterns of utilized assistance. Finally, we assess economic effects by studying subsequent business performance employing propensity score matching. We cannot reveal that business assistance translates into better start-up performance. However, we find that a lack of personal entrepreneurial resources predicts take-up of business assistance in general as well as perceived usefulness of comprehensive business assistance.

We investigate the effects that regional start-up activity has on employment in new and in incumbent businesses. The analysis is performed for West German regions over the 1987-2002 period. It shows that the effects of new businesses on employment in the incumbents are significantly positive and that this indirect effect on incumbent employment leads to more jobs than what is created by the newcomers. We find that the effect of new business formation on incumbents is exclusively driven by start-ups that survive a certain period of time. We draw conclusions for policy and for further research.

It is widely unclear as to whether start-up firms supported by publicly-initiated incubator initiatives have higher survival rates than comparable start-up firms that have not received support by such initiatives. This paper contributes to the underlying discussion by performing an empirical analysis of the long-term survival of 371 incubator firms (after their graduation) from five German incubators and contrasting these results with the long-term survival of a control group of 371 comparable non-incubated firms. The analysis covers a 10-year time span. To account for the problem of selection bias, a nonparametric matching approach is applied to identify an appropriate control group. For neither of the five incubator locations we find statistically significant higher survival probabilities for firms located in incubators compared to firms located outside those incubator organizations. For three incubator locations the analysis even reveals statistically significant lower chances of survival for those start-ups having received support by an incubator. We therefore arrive at the conclusion that being located in an incubator - contrasting the widespread rhetoric of policy actors and incubator stakeholders - does not increase the chances of long-term business survival. Besitzen Jungunternehmen, die durch Technologie- und Gründerzentren (TGZ) gefördert werden, eine höhere Überlebenswahrscheinlichkeit als Jungunternehmen, die nicht von dieser Förderung profitiert haben? Oftmals wird dieser positive Effekt unterstellt; empirisch untersucht, wurde er jedoch bislang kaum. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht diese Fragestellung daher erstmalig für TGZ in Deutschland. Hierzu werden die Entwicklungspfade von 371 ehemals durch TGZ geförderten Unternehmen und von 371 Unternehmen einer Kontrollgruppe miteinander verglichen. Die Analyse umfasst zehn Jahre und insgesamt fünf Standorte. Signifikant höhere Überlebenschancen geförderter Unternehmen gegenüber der Kontrollgruppe sind für keinen der fünf untersuchten Standorte nachweisbar. In drei von fünf Fällen besitzen die geförderten Unternehmen langfristig statistisch signifikant niedrigere Überlebenschancen gegenüber der Kontrollgruppe. Die empirischen Ergebnisse lassen Zweifel an einem positiven Einfluss einer Unternehmensförderung durch TGZ auf das Überleben der Förderempfänger aufkommen.

This paper investigates four cohorts of firms from German manufacturing industries that started to export in the years between 1998 and 2002 and follows them over the five years after the start. Export starters are a rare species and they are small on average compared to incumbent exporters. Between 30 percent and 40 percent of the starters became continuous exporters; some starters stepped out and back into exporting, many of them more than once. The share of total exports contributed by export starters of a cohort is tiny in the start year, and it remains so over the years to follow, although those starters that were exporters in year t+5 had a share of exports in total sales that was more than twice as high as the average share of exports in total sales among the export starters of the same cohort in year t. Contrary to the market selection hypothesis there is no evidence that productivity in the start year is systematically related to survival in the export market. There is no evidence for a negative impact of a smaller firm size in the start year on the chance to survive on the export market. Starting with a higher share of exports in total sales, however, tends to increase the probability to stay on the export market. This paper investigates four cohorts of firms from German manufacturing industries that started to export in the years between 1998 and 2002 and follows them over the five years after the start. Export starters are a rare species and they are small on average compared to incumbent exporters. Between 30 percent and 40 percent of the starters became continuous exporters; some starters stepped out and back into exporting, many of them more than once. The share of total exports contributed by export starters of a cohort is tiny in the start year, and it remains so over the years to follow, although those starters that were exporters in year t+5 had a share of exports in total sales that was more than twice as high as the average share of exports in total sales among the export starters of the same cohort in year t. Contrary to the market selection hypothesis there is no evidence that productivity in the start year is systematically related to survival in the export market. There is no evidence for a negative impact of a smaller firm size in the start year on the chance to survive on the export market. Starting with a higher share of exports in total sales, however, tends to increase the probability to stay on the export market.

Turning unemployment into self-employment has become an increasingly important part of active labor market policies (ALMP) in many OECD countries. Germany is a good example where the spending on start-up subsidies for the unemployed accounted for nearly 17% of the total spending on ALMP in 2004. In contrast to other programs - like vocational training, job creation schemes, or wage subsidies - the empirical evidence on the effectiveness of such schemes is still scarce; especially regarding long-term effects and effect heterogeneity. This paper aims to close this gap. We use administrative and survey data from a large sample of participants in two distinct start-up programs and a control group of unemployed individuals. We find that over 80% of participants are integrated in the labor market and have relatively high labor income five years after start-up. Additionally, participants are much more satisfied with their current occupational situation compared to previous jobs. Based on conditional propensity score matching methods we estimate the long-term effects of the programs against non-participation. Our results show that both programs are effective with respect to income and employment outcomes in the long-run. Moreover, we consider effect heterogeneity with respect to several dimensions and show that start-up subsidies for the unemployed tend to be most effective for disadvantaged groups in the labor market.

What is the impact of firm entry regulation on sustained entry into self-employment? How does firm entry regulation influence the performance of long-living entrants? In this paper, I address these questions by exploiting a natural experiment in firm entry regulation. After German reunification, East and West Germany faced different economic conditions, but fell under the same law that imposes a substantial mandatory standard on entrepreneurs who want to start a legally independent firm in one of the regulated occupations. The empirical results suggest that the entry regulation suppresses long-living entrants, not only entrants in general or transient, short-lived entrants. This effect on the number of long-living entrants is not accompanied by a counteracting effect on the performance of long-living entrants, as measured by firm size several years after entry.

The objective of this study is to determine whether specific industries across countries or within countries are more likely to reach a stage of profitability and make a successful exit. In particular, we assess whether firms in certain industries are more prone to exit via IPO, be acquired, or exit through a leveraged buy-out. We are also interested in analyzing whether substantial differences across industries and countries arise when looking separately at the success’ rate of firms which have received venture funding at the early seed and start-up stages, vis-à-vis firms that received funding at later stages. Our results suggest that, inasmuch as some of the differences in performance can be explained by country-specific factors, there are also important idiosyncratic differences across industries: In particular, firms in the biotech and the medical / health / life science sectors tend to be significantly more likely to have a successful exit via IPO, while firms in the computer industry and communications and media are more prone to exit via merger or acquisition. Key differences across industries also emerge when considering infant versus mature firms, and their preferred exit. JEL Classification: G24, G3 Keywords

Start-ups mostly have only limited internal financing. Post-entry performance should thus strongly depend on the availability of new external capital. In this study we analyze the impact of financial constraints on the performance of Swiss start-ups. Since we use cohort data, we have for some start-ups data at different points in time. This allows us to analyze whether the effect of the availability of external capital on firm performance changes with increasing age of the firms. To measure the impact of external capital as a whole, we include separate indicators for debt and venture capital constraints. Using different performance measures, we find that debt constraints are not only a problem of the first years. While the negative impact of debt constraints on firm survival disappears with increasing age of the firms, profit is persistently negative affected by debt constraints. Debt constraints, however, do not impact employment growth of the firms, not even in the first years. The availability of venture capital is of lower relevance for the post-entry performance. Surviving and growth of the start-ups is not affected by venture capital constraints. However, firms with limited access to venture capital persistently have problems to attain profit break-even., KOF Working Papers, 241

When unemployed persons go into business, they often are characterized as necessity entrepreneurs, because push factors, namely their unemployment, likely prompted their decision. In contrast to this, business founders who have been previously employed represent opportunity entrepreneurs because pull factors provide the rationale for their decision. However, a data set of nearly 1,900 business start-ups by unemployed persons reveals that both kind of motivation can be observed among these start-ups. Moreover, a new type of entrepreneur emerges, motivated by both push and pull variables simultaneously. An analysis of the development of the businesses reflecting three different motivational types indicates a strong relationship between motives, survival rates and entrepreneurial development. We find in particular that start-ups out of opportunity and necessity have higher survival rates than do start-ups out of necessity, even if both types face the same duration of previous unemployment.

In this paper, I analyse how the survival of new firms is affected by the average ability level in the founding team, the team size, team members' homogeneity with respect to ability, and team members' heterogeneity with respect to education. As a theoretical basis, I apply the O-ring theory (Kremer (1993)). Using a rich employer-employee data set on the whole population of Danish firms founded in 1998, I find that the average ability level in a team and the team size have positive effects on firm survival. Having a team at all is the most crucial factor for the probability of survival of young firms. The degree of homogeneity with respect to ability and the degree of heterogeneity with respect to educations have no effect on the survival probability.

According to Becker's (1957) famous theory on discrimination, entrepreneurs with a strong prejudice against female workers forgo profits by submitting to their tastes. In a competitive market their firms lack efficiency and are therefore forced to leave. We present new empirical evidence for this prediction by studying the survival of startup firms in a large longitudinal matched employer-employee data set from Austria. Our results show that firms with strong preferences for discrimination, i.e. a low share of female employees relatively to the industry average, have significantly shorter survival rates. This is especially relevant for firms starting out with female shares in the lower tail of the distribution. They exit about 18 months earlier than firms with a median share of females. We see no differences in survival between firms at the top of the female share distribution and at the median, though. We further document that highly discriminatory firms that manage to survive submit to market powers and increase their female workforce over time.

In this paper we investigate the relationship between females among the first hires of start-up companies and business success. Our results show that firms with female first hires have a higher share of female workers at the end of the first year after entry. Further, we find that firms with female first hires are more successful and stay longer in the market. We conclude that our results support the hypothesis that gender-diversity in leading positions is an advantage for start-up firms.

We propose that the effect of market concentration on firm survival is different according to whether an industry is static (low entry and exit) or dynamic. In our empirical analysis we find support for this hypothesis. Industry concentration rates reduce the survival of new plants but only in markets marked by low entry and exit rates. Specifically, a 10 percent increase in the 5-firm concentration ratio in a dynamic market raises the survival rate of new ventures by approximately 2 percent. Our results have implications for the antitrust/competition law indicating less need for regulation of dominant firms in dynamic industries characterized by high entry and exit rates. We use a unique dataset comprising the population of new ventures that enter the UK market in 1998.

So far, there has been no data set which observes firm formations in Germany not only on a cross-sectional basis using one-time surveys, but continuously over a number of years. Therefore, the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), KfW Bankengruppe and Creditreform set up a panel study of newly founded firms in Germany: the KfW/ZEW Start-up Panel. In each of the yearly panel waves computer-aided telephone interviews (CATI) are conducted with about 6,000 start-up firms from almost all industries. The KfW/ZEW Start-up Panel will for the first time enable profound analyses of the temporal development of newly founded firms, including studies of firm survival. This paper describes the design of the KfW/ZEW Start-up Panel. The survey's research potential is illustrated using data from the first panel wave conducted in the year 2008. Data access for external researchers and data protection issues of the confidential micro data are discussed.

Empirical analyses suggest that the employment creating effect of start-ups is highest in regions with a low level of new business formation and that an increase in the regional start-up rate beyond a certain level may lead to negative employment effect. In explaining these results, we assume that the average quality of regional start-ups decreases with the number of start-ups, while the costs of the induced resource reallocation increase. Our model implies that it is not the number of start-ups but their quality that is decisive for their effect on economic development. Therefore, a policy aiming at stimulating economic growth through entrepreneurship should focus on high-quality start-ups.

Human capital is known to be one of the most important predictors of a person's earnings. With regard to entrepreneurial success, founders' human capital is an important determinant of firm's employment growth as well. This paper investigates if the depreciation of a founder's academic knowledge affects a start-up's employment growth. The depreciation of academic knowledge is investigated by quantifying the effect of the time period which elapses after the founder has left university until the start-up is founded on firm's employment growth. Using quantile regressions, human capital depreciation is found to be of crucial importance for both ordinary academic start-ups and academic spin-offs, the founders of the latter suffering even more from human capital depreciation.

Innovative start-ups are an important driver of economic growth. This article presents empirical evidence on the effects of R&D on new product development, inter-firm alliances and employment growth during the early life course of firms. We use a dataset that contains a sample of new firms that is representative for the whole population of start-ups. This dataset covers the first six years of the life course of firms. R&D reveals to play several roles during the early life course of high tech as well as high growth firms. The effect of initial R&D on high tech firm growth runs via increasing levels of inter-firm alliances in the first post-entry years. R&D efforts enable the exploitation of external knowledge. Initial R&D also stimulates new product development later on in the life course of high tech firms, but this does not seem to affect firm growth. R&D does not affect the growth rate of new low tech firms, which seems to be driven mainly by the growth ambitions of the founding entrepreneur. The results show that R&D matters for a limited but important set of new high tech and high growth firms, which are key in innovation and entrepreneurship policies.

In this paper, we evaluate the success of publicly supported business start-ups by comparing the outcomes of various support measures. Our question is: do business starter get what they need? Since we do not know the needs of the founders we analyse (1) who received which kind of support (financial support, individual coaching, general information) and (2) which kind of support is successful for whom with regard to his/her job history (employed, unemployed or being not part of the job market). While start-up measures possibly could aim at different kinds of eff ects, our focus is on the effect on subsequent firm growth. The analysis is based on a survey conducted in 2005. The sample was drawn from a highly heterogeneous population of business start-ups. By using propensity score exact matching for success measurement we try to capture those differences.

We view the entrepreneur as an agent who possesses human capital in the form of specific skills or talents. When she starts a firm, her human capital is essential to the firm and it has substantial private value. The entrepreneur transforms her human capital over time into what we call organization capital'. This organization capital can be sold as part of the firm, so the dynamic process of transforming specific human capital into organization capital means that the value of the firm increases over time.

Basierend auf einer Datenbasis von insgesamt 149 ehemalig durch Technologie- und Gründerzentren geförderten Unternehmen wird untersucht, inwiefern ein Zusammenhang zwischen der Aufenthaltsdauer der Unternehmen in den Zentren sowie dem Betriebsalter der Zentren und der langfristigen Überlebensfähigkeit der Unternehmen nach dem Auszug besteht. Eine derartige Untersuchung liegt bislang nicht vor. Die empirischen Ergebnisse eines Coxproportionalen Hazard Modells sowie verschiedener Accelerated Failure Time Modelle zeigen statistisch signifikant negative Effekte beider Faktoren auf die Überlebensfähigkeit der untersuchten Unternehmen. Eine mögliche Erklärung mag sich darin finden lassen, dass eine zunehmende Wahrnehmung regionalwirtschaftlicher Aufgaben der Technologieund Gründerzentren (beispielsweise Betreuung von Netzwerkinitiativen) die Effektivität einer Förderung hinsichtlich der Überlebensfähigkeit der unterstützten Unternehmen mindert. Das Diskussionspapier schließt mit wirtschaftspolitischen Empfehlungen.

We investigate regional differences in the contribution of newly founded businesses to regional employment. This is labeled the direct employment effect of new businesses. The analysis is at the spatial level of West German planning regions for the period 1984-2002. We find rather pronounced differences for the direct employment effect across regions. Regression analyses for explaining these differences show that the start-up rate, the education level of the regional workforce, and an entrepreneurial character of the regional technological regime have a positive impact on the direct employment effect of new businesses. The overall effect of population density is negative, but the marginal effect is positive for regions beyond a certain threshold. Our results suggest that the success of the new businesses is not at the expense of the incumbents but that direct and indirect employment effects of new businesses are positively interlinked.

Die Ich-AG (Existenzgründungszuschuss) war eines der zentralen Instrumente, das im Rahmen der Hartz-Reformen in den arbeitsmarktpolitischen Kanon aufgenommen wurde. Zusammen mit dem bereits seit langem bekannten Überbrückungsgeld wurden damit zwischen 2003 und 2006 mehr als eine Million vormals Arbeitsloser bei der Gründung eines Unternehmens gefördert. Frühere Studien haben gezeigt, dass sich beide Programme ergänzten, indem sie unterschiedliche Personengruppen zur Existenzgründung aktivierten. In den kurz- bis mittelfristigen Analysen im Rahmen der Hartz-Evaluationen wurden beide Programme ebenfalls positiv bewertet. Bislang unerforscht sind allerdings deren langfristige Wirkungen. Das vorliegende Papier schließt diese Lücke und gibt Aufschluss über den Erfolg von geförderten Existenzgründern fünf Jahre nach der Gründung. Es zeigt sich, dass zu diesem Zeitpunkt noch nahezu 50-60% der ehemaligen Ich-AG-Gründer/innen und zwischen 53-67% der mit Überbrückungsgeld Geförderten in Voll- oder Teilzeit selbständig tätig sind. Hinsichtlich der Integration in den ersten Arbeitsmarkt können beide Programme als effektiv angesehen werden: Die Teilnehmer weisen höhere Beschäftigungsquoten als eine Kontrollgruppe von nicht-geförderten Arbeitslosen auf und erzielen höhere Einkommen. Die induzierten Beschäftigungseffekte sind für das Überbrückungsgeld relativ hoch; auf 100.000 Förderungen entfallen knapp 80.000 zusätzliche Vollzeitäquivalente.

Based on an improved and extended database, the Establishment History Panel, we extend the analysis of Fritsch & Weyh (2006) by investigating the development of employment in German start-up co-horts for the period 1976 to 2004. We confirm the typical pattern of an initial increasing and then soon decreasing number of employees in start-up cohorts. Furthermore, we provide some of the first evidence for the ”liability of aging” phenomena in Germany. Older firms face a relatively high risk of failure. Although only the largest 25% of the surviving entries grow in terms of employment, after 25 years the number of employees in these relatively large businesses strongly declines.

Risk attitudes have an impact on not only the decision to become an entrepreneur but also the survival and failure rates of entrepreneurs. Whereas recent research underpins the theoretical proposition of a positive correlation between risk attitudes and the decision to become an entrepreneur, the effects on survival are not as straightforward. Psychological research posits an inverse U-shaped relationship between risk attitudes and entrepreneurial survival. On the basis of recent waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we examine the extent to which risk attitudes influence survival rates of entrepreneurs. The empirical results confirm that persons whose risk attitudes are in the medium range survive significantly longer as entrepreneurs than do persons with particularly low or high risks.

We analyze different types of effects that new businesses may have on regional employment. We introduce different measures for employment change by separating employment change in incumbent businesses and employment change in new businesses. There are pronounced differences between regions with regard to the different employment effects. The average indirect employment effects of new business formation on incumbent employment are positive and are considerably larger than the employment that is directly generated in the new businesses.

Many studies have explored the determinants of entering into entrepreneurship and the differences in self-employment rates across racial and ethnic groups. However, very little is known about the survival in entrepreneurship of immigrants to the U.S. and their descendants. Employing data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, we find a lower survival probability in entrepreneurship for Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants, which does not carry on to their U.S.-born descendants. We also find that these two immigrant groups tend to enter entrepreneurship from unemployment or inactivity and they are more likely to exit towards employment in the wage sector, suggesting that entrepreneurship represents for them an intermediate step from non-employment to paid employment.

We examine whether founders’ backgrounds influence new firm survival in the early years after start-up. We develop hypotheses linking founders’ back-grounds to pre-entry capabilities associated with entrepreneurial human capital, highlighting the cases of spin-offs and habitual entrepreneurs. The subject of unemployment-driven entrepreneurship is also explored. We find that specific human capital more frequently found in spin-off founders plays a key role in enhancing survival chances, while more general forms of human capital may help inexperienced entrepreneurs overcome the barrier posed by the critical early years after start-up.

Dieses Papier präsentiert deskriptive Evidenz zur Struktur von Ich-AG-Gründungen und Gründern aus dem Arbeitsagenturbezirk Lüneburg. Die Ergebnisse basieren auf einer Befragung aller Gründer, die zwischen Juni 2004 und Februar 2005 selbstständig geworden sind und von der Arbeitsagentur Lüneburg gefördert wurden.

The analysis in this paper gives attention to effects on firm survival which come from entrepreneurial experience. It is likely that different kinds of experience result in different firm developments and therefore in different types of firm exit. Particular emphasis is placed upon the effects of failure experience. The results provide evidence that both the kind of experience and the type of exit matter. Negative experience, namely the experience of failure, is found to heighten the risk of failing again. This finding indicates that business failures are largely not exceptions, but rather a sign of the entrepreneurs' lack of ability.

Fostering and supporting start-up businesses by unemployed persons has become an increasingly important issue in many European countries. These new ventures are being supported by various governmental programs. Potential benefits include not only the end of unemployment for the new entrepreneur but also some further positive effects, e.g., direct job creation. However, it is often feared that the previously unemployed lack the basic qualifications to become entrepreneurs. Empirical evidence on skill-composition, direct job creation and other key variables is rather scarce, largely because of inadequate data availability. We base our analysis on a unique and very informative survey data containing a representative sample of over 3,100 start-ups founded by unemployed persons in Germany. Individuals were subsidized under two different schemes, and we are able to draw on extensive pre- and post-founding information concerning the characteristics of the business (start-up capital, industry, etc.) and of the business founders (education, motivation, preparation, etc.). We find that formerly unemployed founders are motivated by push and pull factors. Using a proportional hazard duration model with unobserved heterogeneity allows us to analyze the characteristics which drive success of the businesses. While survival rates 2.5 years after business founding are quite high (around 70%) for both programs and genders, the characteristics of the newly developed businesses are heterogeneous.

Die vorliegende Dokumentation stellt die Ergebnisse eines Forschungsprojekts dar, das mit Hilfe eines neuen Ansatzes empirische Aussagen zur Struktur und Entwicklung von Unternehmensgründungen in der Biotechnologie in Deutschland zu gewinnen versucht hat. Mit Hilfe einer halbautomatisierten Textanalyse von Geschäftstätigkeitsbeschreibungen sollten Biotechnologie-Gründungen der Jahre 1991 bis 2004 identifiziert und anhand einer Reihe von Kennzahlen, die aus bereits vorliegenden Datenquellen gewonnen wurden, analysiert werden. Ein Untersuchungsschwerpunkt war dabei die Frage der Erfolgsfaktoren von Biotechnologie-Gründungen in Bezug auf Überleben und Beschäftigungswachstum, auch im Vergleich zu anderen Gründungen in der Hochtechnologie. Mit der Studie sollte auch geprüft werden, inwieweit der Ansatz dazu geeignet ist, das Gründungsgeschehen und die Unternehmensstruktur in einer Branche zu erfassen, die über die gängige Wirtschaftszweigsystematik nur unzureichend abgebildet werden kann, und Branchenanalysen unter Nutzung von Mikrodaten durchzuführen, ohne auf eine Befragung von Unternehmen zurückgreifen zu müssen.

The process of the entrepreneurial decision is decomposed in seven engagement levels ranging from never thought about starting a business to gave up, thinking about it, taking steps for starting up, having a young business, having an older business and no longer being an entrepreneur. By using a multinomial logit model we allow the effect of covariates to differ across the various entrepreneurial engagement levels. Data from two Entrepreneurship Flash Eurobarometer surveys (2002 and 2003) con-taining over 20,000 observations of the 15 old EU member states, Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein and the US are used. Other than demographic variables, the set of explanatory variables used includes the percep-tion by respondents of administrative complexities, of availability of financial support and of risk tolerance, the respondents preference for self-employment and country specific effects. Among our results we find that the perception of lack of financial support has no discriminative effect across the various levels of en-trepreneurial engagement while perception of administrative complexities plays a negative role only for high levels of engagement.

Why should individuals that have exited their firm consider re-entering into entrepreneurship, i.e. become renascent entrepreneurs? According to the logic of economic models of firm dynamics there is no reason to re-enter into entrepreneurship following termination of a previous firm. In contrast, research on nascent entrepreneurship has shown the positive effect of entrepreneurial experience on planning a new firm start. Based on the empirical evidence from a database consisting of ex-entrepreneurs, this study shows that renascent entrepreneurship is a pervasive phenomenon in current society. Especially entrepreneurial human and social capital induce renascent entrepreneurship. In addition, the nature of the firm exit also affects the probability of renascent entrepreneurship.

The paper uses a unique dataset comprising a population of new ventures that enter the UK market in 1998. The data comprises services as well as manufacturing industries. The central hypothesis is that new ventures are differently affected by industry competition and growth in dynamic compared to static markets. Estimation of a hazard function supports this hypothesis. In dynamic markets the survival of new ventures is increasing in industry concentration and decreasing in growth. The same is not true for static markets. The results shed new insights into the dynamics of entrants and highlight some important effects for competition policy.

This article describes the benefits and pitfalls of starting a firm with an entrepreneurial team, drawing on a longitudinal empirical analysis of the life course of 90 team start-ups and 1196 solo start-ups in the Netherlands. In the first three years of their existence, team start-ups perform better than solo start-ups on several success indicators. However, after this start phase, entrepreneurial teams face particular problems in realizing further growth. These team-specific bottlenecks can even threaten firm survival. In later life course phases we found a clear distinction between entrepreneurial teams with stagnating growth and teams that succeeded in solving these problems and went on to realize further growth.

"Using a linked employer-employee data set for Germany, this paper analyzes labour fluctuation and wage setting in a cohort of newly founded and other establishments from 1997 to 2001. We show empirically that start-ups tend to have higher labour turnover rates, ceteris paribus. Moreover, bargaining coverage rates and wages in new firms are lower than in similar incumbent firms. Both the excess labour fluctuation and the wage differential are shown to decline and become insignificant over time as the newly founded firms mature. Our results imply that it takes a new firm only a few years to become an incumbent firm." (author's abstract) "Unter Verwendung eines kombinierten Firmen-Beschäftigten-Datensatzes für Deutschland analysiert der Beitrag die Arbeitskräftefluktuation und die Lohnsetzung in einer Kohorte von neu gegründeten und anderen Betrieben im Zeitraum von 1997 bis 2001. Wir zeigen empirisch, dass Neugründungen ceteris paribus tendenziell höhere Arbeitskräftefluktuationsraten aufweisen. Überdies liegen die Tarifbindungsquoten und die Löhne in Neugründungen unter denen in vergleichbaren bestehenden Betrieben. Es zeigt sich, dass mit der Reifung der Betriebe im Zeitablauf sowohl die erhöhte Arbeitskräftefluktuation als auch das Lohndifferenzial zurückgehen und schließlich insignifikant werden. Unsere Ergebnisse implizieren, dass es nur ein paar Jahre dauert, bis ein neues Unternehmen zu einem bestehenden Unternehmen wird." (Autorenreferat)

There is considerable consensus in the literature that entrepreneurs are prone to unrealistic optimism. Our new field evidence from a sample of four-month-old start-ups echoes this finding: as many as 87% of new entrepreneurs expect to survive at least three years in business, whereas the actual statistical survival rate is around 60%. Our field study allows us to rule out certain previously overlooked explanations for the often-documented optimistic bias in new entrepreneurs’ judgment: It is not due to a framing effect nor driven by rash and sloppy survey responses by busy entrepreneurs. Nor can we relate it to the risk preferences of entrepreneurs or to a difficulty in understanding algebra of probability. We also study how entrepreneurs update their failure rate expectations: When prompted to rethink, 33% of the entrepreneurs update their risk beliefs. We reject the formal restrictions of a Bayesian learning model, in part because of the presence of optimistic entrepreneurs. entrepreneurship, new firms, default, expectations, survival 1. healthcare 2. food with health effects 3. energy and other biomass based applications 4. bioinformatics. These initiatives have been presented for all of the representatives of the main stakeholders related to biotechnology: 1) the industry, 2) governmental bodies, and 3) academia, both at individual and institutional level. The key question for the success of the Finnish biotechnology industry is to be able to take advantage of our domestic strengths, acknowledge our limited resources, and yet realize the global view of biotechnology. Our goal has been to connect our findings from the Finnish Biotechnology sector to the major trends recognized in the literature concerning international trade theory. Consequently, the following concepts form the basis of this strategy paper: 1. International Trade and the Comparative Advantage 2. Market Structure and Spatial Agglomeration 3. Infant Industry Argument, and 4. Cluster Dynamics.

In diesem Beitrag werden die Auswirkungen sektoraler, regionaler sowie betrieblicher Determinanten auf das Scheitern junger Betriebe mit Hilfe eines ökonometrischen Überlebensdauer-Ansatzes analysiert. Dabei findet ein accelerated failure time model mit zugrunde liegender log-logistischer Verteilung Anwendung. Datengrundlage bildet das IAB-Betriebspanel, eine repräsentative Betriebsbefragung des Instituts für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB). In die Analyse gehen junge Betriebe im privaten Sektor (westdeutsche Bundesländer, Zeitraum 1993-2002) ein. Die Schließungswahrscheinlichkeit junger Betriebe ist in Sektoren mit hoher mindestoptimaler Betriebsgröße und einer hohen Anzahl von Gründungen überdurchschnittlich hoch. Darüber hinaus spielen regionale Faktoren eine zentrale Rolle. Auf betrieblicher Ebene ist die Betriebsgröße der beste Prädiktor für die Schließungswahrscheinlichkeit.

Anhand einer Kohorte von Betrieben des IAB-Betriebspanels, die 1995/96 ihren ersten sozialversicherungspflichtig Beschäftigten einstellten, werden potenzielle Erklärungsfaktoren des Überlebens und der Beschäftigungsentwicklung neu gegründeter Betriebe bis 2003 analysiert. Zu den wenigen robusten, längerfristig statistisch signifikanten Ergebnissen zählen der negative Zusammenhang zwischen der Startgröße eines Betriebes und seiner Beschäftigungsentwicklung sowie die höheren Überlebenswahrscheinlichkeiten von Betrieben mit einem Startkapital von über 50.000 DM und von Gründungen im sekundären Sektor. Dagegen scheinen (messbare) sozio-demographische Merkmale des Gründers keine wichtige Rolle für den Erfolg der neuen Betriebe zu spielen. Based on a cohort of establishments from the IAB Establishment Panel which hired their first employee in 1995/96, this paper analyzes potential determinants of the survival and employment growth of these newly founded firms until the year 2003. There are few robust results that are statistically significant in the long term. These include a negative relationship between an establishment´s start size and its employment growth as well as higher probabilities of survival for establishments with a starting capital of more than 50,000 DM and for start-ups in the production sector. In contrast, (measurable) socio-demographic characteristics of the founder do not seem to play an important role for the success of new plants.

We study the implications of ownership and its induced incentives on firm survival on the stock market for young and high-tech firms. Using a unique data set of all 341 firms listed on the Neuer Markt, the German counterpart of the NASDAQ, our results differ from studies on more traditional firms. Ownership by CEOs has no influence on firm survival when introducing measurements of human capital and intellectual property rights. This confirms assumptions that firms in the knowledge based industries differ also in their governance structure from traditional firms.

This paper examines the relationship between firm births and job creation in Great Britain. We use a new data set for 60 British regions, covering the whole of Great Britain, between 1980 and 1998. The relationship between new-firm startups and employment growth has previously been examined either with no time-lag or with only a short period lag. We find, for GB as a whole, no significant relationship between startups and employment creation in the 1980s, but a negative relationship for the 'low enterprise' area of the North East of England. For the 1990s we find a significant positive relationship for GB as a whole but for Scotland, which focussed policy on startups, a negative relationship. We feel this raises questions over policies designed to raise rates of new firm formation as a strategy for employment creation, particularly in 'low enterprise' areas.

We analyze the effect of industry, region and time on new-business survival rates by means of a multi-dimensional approach. The data relate to West German districts in the 1983-2000 period. The survival chances of start-ups tend to be relatively low in industries characterized by a high minimum efficient size and high numbers of entries. Regional growth has a rather pronounced positive influence on survival rates, while the relationship between the nationwide development of the particular industry and survival tends to be negative. We also find a remarkably high level of spatial autocorrelation. Wir analysieren den Einfluss von branchenspezifischen Faktoren und Standortein-flüssen über die Zeit auf die Überlebensraten neu gegründeter Betrieben mit ei-nem multidimensionalen Ansatz. Die Untersuchung bezieht sich auf die Kreise Westdeutschland im Zeitraum 1983-2000. Die Überlebenschancen sind relativ niedrig in Branchen, die durch eine hohe mindesteffiziente Betriebsgröße und ein hohes Maß an Gründungen gekennzeichnet sind. Regionales Wachstum hat einen deutlich positiven Einfluss, während sich für die nationale Entwicklung der betreffenden Branche eher ein negativer Zusammenhang mit den Überlebens-chancen zeigt. In den Analysen ergibt sich ein bemerkenswert hohes Maß an räumlicher Autokorrelation.