Increasing competition in science and higher education has sparked contentious debate and scholarly attention in recent years. Despite their significant merits, prevailing accounts of competition fall short of capturing the competitive dynamics in science and higher education: Most of the time, actors in this sector are involved in not just one but several competitions. Universities as organizations, researchers as individual actors, and also state actors are simultaneously embedded in different, nested, and interdependent competitions, which… [read more]

While the importance of local characteristics for innovation activities has been studied extensively, it remains largely unknown to which extent better transport-based accessibilities facilitate innovation. This study builds on data from a Germany-wide agent-based transport model to derive local accessibilities for different modes of transport and accounting for road congestion. We employ these accessibilities to investigate their role in explaining variation in local innovation activities. Besides geographical information on inventive activity… [read more]

Industrial policy is increasingly becoming a central focus of German and European economic policy. In this article, Hanna Hottenrott, Roman Inderst, Eckhard Janeba, Klaus Schmidt, Achim Wambach, and Christine Zulehner develop a framework for industrial policy interventions. They demonstrate that industrial policy measures can be justified when used to promote innovation, climate protection, security of supply, or defense readiness. At the same time, the risks associated with industrial policy—such as distortions of competition, subsidy races,… [read more]

We investigate public support and venture capital (VC) investment in academic startups. Government support may enable follow-on investment by providing a quality signal to investors. This signal is especially important for academic startups, which face large funding gaps due to their complexity, cutting-edge nature, and uncertainty regarding the founders' management capabilities and commitment. Using a panel of startups in Germany, our analyses confirm that academic startups are more likely to obtain follow-on VC investment after receiving… [read more]

The IAB/ZEW Start-Up Panel is a longitudinal and representative survey established in 2008, designed to focus on founders and their businesses during the very early stages of the firm life cycle. Data on newly founded companies, their founders, business activities, and innovation and market strategies is scarce, posing challenges for both research and evidence-based policymaking. The IAB/ZEW Start-Up Panel’s objective is to provide reliable research data on new businesses in Germany for the research community. This paper outlines the panel’s… [read more]

While many digital technologies provide opportunities for creating business models that impact sustainability, some technologies, especially blockchain applications, are often criticized for harming the environment, e.g. due to high energy demand. In our study, we present a novel approach to identifying sustainability-focused blockchain companies and relate their level of engagement to location factors and entrepreneurial ecosystem embeddedness. For this, we use a large-scale web scraping approach to analyze the textual content and hyperlink… [read more]

The availability of social media data is growing and represents a new data source for economic research. This paper presents a detailed study on the use of data from a career-oriented social networking platform. The employment data are exported from user profiles and linked to the Mannheim Enterprise Panel (MUP). The linked employer–employee (LEE) data consist of 14 million employments for 1.5 million employers and describes around 9 million employee flows. Plausibility checks confirm that career-oriented social networking data contain valuable… [read more]

Start-up subsidies play an important role in supporting start-up innovation and performance. However, what characteristics help and hinder start-ups to seek public subsidies remains unclear. We study whether and how founder personality links to entrepreneurs’ seeking of start-up subsidies. We argue that greater founders’ openness, extraversion, and entrepreneurial orientation enhance seeking of start-up subsidies, while greater founders’ agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism inhibit it. Additionally, we argue that entrepreneurial… [read more]

In recent years, transportation network companies (TNCs) have grown rapidly. However, with the high intensity of competition caused by multi-homing and low switching costs, providers like Uber and Lyft have yet to achieve profitability. Following the winner-takes-all theory, providers fight for market dominance with price wars and incentives, expecting to achieve profitability once they gain market power. However, despite extensive research on why customers use TNCs instead of other modes, there is limited research on customer choice between… [read more]

Increasing the participation of women in top-level corporate boards is high on the agenda of policy-makers. Yet, we know little about director appointment dynamics and the drivers and impediments of women appointments. This study builds on organizational and group-level behavior theories and empirically investigates how ex-ante board structures and gender-specific board dynamics impact the representation of women on corporate boards. We study boards of listed firms in Europe between 2002 and 2019 and find a declining appointment probability for… [read more]