The Long Wind of Change. Educational Impacts on Entrepreneurial Intentions

In this paper, we assess educational factors which might have an impact on entrepreneurship. We analyze influences on the entrepreneurial intentions of German university students and find that pre-university education significantly affects their desire to become an entrepreneur. Using the recent German history of separation and reunification as quasi-natural experiment, we focus on the early formation of entrepreneurial endowments during adolescence and investigate whether pre-university education affects university students’ entrepreneurial intentions. Particularly, we analyze the impact of socialization and schooling under the socialist regime of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) which might hamper entrepreneurship. Our results show that socialist education has a negative effect on the entrepreneurial intentions of students in reunified Germany who were brought up in the GDR. When analyzing the subsample of East German students who were partly educated in the FRG after reunification in 1990, we find that some years of education in the liberal market system increase the entrepreneurial intentions of students born in the GDR. We focus on university students, since universities are seen as potential “breeding ground†for innovative entrepreneurship as described by Schumpeter (1912). Here we assume according to Falck et al. (2009) that entrepreneurial intentions are a good predictor for future entrepreneurship. We use data from a regularly repeated survey among university students in Germany. Our analysis rests on the three waves conducted after reunification at 23 universities, in (the former socialist) East as well as in West Germany. Generally, German students have significantly lower entrepreneurial intentions when they were educated in the GDR. We further restrict our sample to mobile students at West German universities and still find a negative effect of socialist education. This effect is also robust to the inclusion of a rich set of control variables concerning the students’ family background, job experience as well as further measures for their educational training. Overall, being educated in the socialist GDR decreases the likelihood of having entrepreneurial intentions between around 4 and 7 percentage points Thus our findings suggest that adolescents’ education might act as effective measure to stimulate entrepreneurship.

Beyond Individual Choice: Teams and Frames in Game Theory

Game theory is central to modern understandings of how people deal with problems of coordination and cooperation. Yet, ironically, it cannot give a straightforward explanation of some of the simplest forms of human coordination and cooperation--most famously, that people can use the apparently arbitrary features of "focal points" to solve coordination problems, and that people sometimes cooperate in "prisoner's dilemmas." Addressing a wide readership of economists, sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers, Michael Bacharach here proposes a revision of game theory that resolves these long-standing problems. In the classical tradition of game theory, Bacharach models human beings as rational actors, but he revises the standard definition of rationality to incorporate two major new ideas. He enlarges the model of a game so that it includes the ways agents describe to themselves (or "frame") their decision problems. And he allows the possibility that people reason as members of groups (or "teams"), each taking herself to have reason to perform her component of the combination of actions that best achieves the group's common goal. Bacharach shows that certain tendencies for individuals to engage in team reasoning are consistent with recent findings in social psychology and evolutionary biology. As the culmination of Bacharach's long-standing program of pathbreaking work on the foundations of game theory, this book has been eagerly awaited. Following Bacharach's premature death, Natalie Gold and Robert Sugden edited the unfinished work and added two substantial chapters that allow the book to be read as a coherent whole.coordination, cooperation, focal points, prisoner's dilemma, rational actors, decision problems, psychology, evolutionary biology

Legacy, sustainability and Olympism: crafting urban outcomes at London 2012

The staging of the Olympic Games has, since the outset, been intended to produce positive and lasting outcomes, but each age has seen the Olympic movement and their appointed host cities recasting the ways in which they have sought to achieve such outcomes in light of their own values and needs. Seen against that background, this paper opens with an historical overview that spans the period since the re-establishment of the Olympics in 1896. It traces the ways in which four notions – memory, regeneration, sustainability and legacy – have progressively emerged as issues that shape the agenda of desired urban outcomes, particularly exploring the evolution of the dynamic, continually evolving but uneasy relationship between sustainability and the overlapping concept of ‘legacy’. The latter part of the paper illustrates these ideas with regard to the London 2012 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games. It analyses the ‘One Planet Games’ concept, how this was developed for the bid, and how it was subsequently put into practice, commenting particularly on the carbon footprint, the creation of the Olympic Park (as sustainable legacy) and the promotion of sustainable living. The conclusion comments on the continuing challenges encountered in maintaining the visibility of sustainability plans while addressing long-term legacy

The history of events: ideology and historiography

This chapter explores the contribution that explicit analysis of historical writings can make to the study of events. In particular, it explores three related propositions. The first concerns “narrative”, understood here as a structured account, rendered in textual form, of a sequence of events that occurred in the past. The second proposition continues the story-telling theme, noting that it is important to recognise the ways that events can be used to represent specific causes and to understand the consequences of doing so. In this regard, we point to the importance of the rich and multifaceted concept of “representation”. The third proposition concerns “narration”, or the way in which the story is told. Here, we argue that understanding of the history of events would benefit from more explicit recognition of the multiple ways in which that history has been, and could be, written. Case studies of the Salzburg Festival, the visit of George IV to Edinburgh in 1822, and the history of the modern Olympic Games are used to illustrate these propositions in turn

On Strike

I saw them there The other night, These men Who live no more..

Framing the future: sustainability, legacy and the 2012 London Games

When the International Olympic Committee (IOC) adopted ‘environment’ as a third pillar of Olympism at its centenary meeting in Paris in 1994, it was partly reacting to an environmentalist lobby critical of the growing scale and impact of the Games. Since then, the Olympic movement has striven to be more proactive in championing sustainable events management and in promoting positive environmental legacies through its bidding procedures for the Summer and Winter Games, its technical manuals and the Impact Studies that monitor a city’s performance. Indeed, the environmental agenda has been subsumed into the broadly adopted discourse that stresses the beneficial legacy bequeathed to the host city in return for the huge expenditure required to host the world’s largest sporting event. Yet, some two decades later, Olympic hosts still struggle with the enormity of what a sustainable Games really means and with developing the mechanisms for delivering it

The Settlement of the East Florida Spaniards in Cuba, 1763-1766

Ten months were required to complete the evacuation of the Spanish population from the St. Augustine presidio. From April 12, 1763, to January 21, 1764, a junta of Governor Melchor Feliu, Don Juan Elixio de la Puente, and Esteban de Pena carefully escorted 3,103 persons to wafting vessels bound for Cuba or New Spain. The evacuees embarked for Havana, Cuba, except for thirty-four people who were later transported to San Francisco de Campeche, New Spain. During the entire movement there were only four casualties from the shipwreck of the sloop “Nuestra Senora del Rosario.” By April 16, 1764, former Governor Melchor Feliu and Don Juan Elixio de la Puente reported that a total of 3,091 residents of the old colonial garrison had departed from the Plaza of St. Augustine, Fort San Marcos de Apalache, and the towns Nuestra Senora de la Leche, Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe de Tolomato, and Santa Terese de Gracia Real de Mosa. Whenever possible rank and class distinctions were honored in the embarkation; Indians and free mulattoes and Negroes were often segregated from the Spaniards, but Spanish Canary Island settlers were also shipped apart from the other Spanish residents

Politics and Property During the Transfer of Florida from Spanish to English Rule, 1763-1764

England acquired legal and sovereign control of Spanish Florida on February 10, 1763. After more than a century of imperialistic adventures, which had assumed the form of invasions and guerrilla penetrations from her colonies to the north, Great Britain wrested Florida from Spain’s grip at the Paris peace conferences following the French and Indian War. Because the British had successfully assaulted Havana in the summer of 1762, the Spanish negotiators reluctantly bartered Florida away in order to retrieve their great treasure terminal of the Indies. Less than four months of diplomacy were required to arrange the end of almost two hundred years of Spanish colonial rule in Tierra Florida

E-Lections: Voting Behavior and the Internet

This paper analyses the effect of information disseminated by the Internet on voting behavior. We address endogeneity in Internet availability by exploiting regional and technological peculiarities of the preexisting voice telephony network that hinder the roll-out of fixed-line broadband infrastructure for high-speed Internet. We find small negative effects of Internet availability on voter turnout, and no evidence that the Internet systematically benefits single parties. Robustness tests including placebo estimations from the pre-Internet era confirm our results. We relate differences in the Internet effect between national and local elections to a crowding out of national but not local newspapers