The Relationship between Technology, Innovation, and Firm Performance: Empirical Evidence on E-Business in Europe

This article analyzes the relationship between the usage of Internet-based technologies, different types of innovation, and performance at the firm level. Data for the empirical investigation originates from a sample of 7,302 European enterprises. The empirical results show that Internet-based technologies were an important enabler of innovation in the year 2003. It was found that all studied types of innovation, including Internet-enabled and non-Internet-enabled product or process innovations, are positively associated with turnover and employment growth. Firms that rely on Internet-enabled innovations are at least as likely to grow as firms that rely on non-Internet-enabled innovations. Finally, it was found that innovative activity is not necessarily associated with higher profitability. Possible reasons for this and implications are discussed

Attractive Supervisors: How Does the Gender of the Supervisor Influence the Performance of the Supervisees?

A series of field and laboratory experiments were conducted in which single-sex groups of male or female students competed in different intellectual tasks to earn money or university grades (N = 291). The supervisor of these groups was one of several youn

Peer Influence in Network Markets: An Empirical Investigation

We analyze the effect of peer influence on the diffusion of an innovative network good. We argue that the adopters of a network good have an incentive to convince others to purchase the same product because their ut

Ondernemerschap en de recessie

Ondernemerschap is een belangrijk en onderschat instrument om recessies te bestrijden. Het is een voorspeller van de economische cyclus, en meer ondernemerschap leidt tot kortere recessies. Ook kunnen ondernemers het vertrouwen in het reddingsplan van de overheid vergroten

Unemployment Benefits Crowd Out Nascent Entrepreneurial Activity

Analyzing a cross-country panel of 16 OECD countries from 2002 to 2005, we find that higher unemployment benefits crowd out nascent entrepreneurial activity. Our results hold regardless of entrepreneurial motivation (necessity or opportunity) and entrepreneurial type (imitative or innovative)

The Influence of Installed Technologies on Future Adoption Decisions: Empirical Evidence from E-Business

This paper studies the adoption times of various e-business technologies in a large sample of firms from 10 different industry sectors and 25 European countries between 1994 and 2002. The results show that the probability of adoption increases with the number of previously adopted e-business technologies. Hence, the more advanced a firm is in using e-business technologies, the more likely it is to adopt additional e-business technologies, provided technologies do not substitute each other in their functionalities. This result is relevant for the marketing of new technologies, strategic planning and, from an economic perspective, for the convergence of growth across regions

Joy leads to Overconfidence, and a Simple Remedy

Overconfidence has been identified as a source of suboptimal decision making in many real- life domains, and it often has far-reaching consequences. Here, we demonstrate a causal mechanism that leads to overconfidence and show a simple, effective remedy for it in an incentive-compatible experimental study. We show that joy induces overconfidence if the reason for joy (an unexpected gift) is unrelated to the judgment task and if participants were not made specifically aware of our mood manipulation. In contrast, we observed well- calibrated judgments among participants in a control group who were in their resting mood. Furthermore, we found well-calibrated judgments am

I Can’t Get No Satisfaction - Necessity Entrepreneurship and Procedural Utility

We study a unique sample of 1,547 nascent entrepreneurs in Germany and analyze which factors are associated with their start-up satisfaction. Our results identify a group of nascent entrepreneurs that “cannot get

Is More Entrepreneurship better?

We develop a new perspective on the boundary of the firm that is consistent with the empirical observation that the share of entrepreneurs first decreases and then increases in the course of economic development. Existing theory based on transaction costs is difficult to relate to these well-established dynamics. Our approach focuses on changing incentives to specialize and adapt, in order to access complementarities that arise from diverse abilities and access to wealth. We discuss why the efficient number of entrepreneurs is bounded and changes in the course of economic development

Entrepreneurship and the Business Cycle

We study the cyclical pattern of entrepreneurial activity. Results across 22 OECD countries for the period 1972-2007 show that entrepreneurial activity is a leading indicator of the business cycle in a Granger-causality sense. This contradicts existing theoretical hypotheses which predict that entrepreneurship is pro-cyclical or not cyclical. We discuss the causes and implications of this finding which have immense policy relevance during the second economic crisis of the 21st century