This paper considers environmental labelling (or ecolabelling for short) as an informational instrument of environmental policy. It examines some economic aspects of environmental labelling, for example, the function of product certification to overcome market failures for environmental superior...

The present paper examines one of the central elements of evolutionary thinking - competition formalized by the replicator dynamics mechanism. Using data on product characteristics of automobiles sold on the German domestic market over the period 2001-2006, we construct a competitiveness or...

Theoretically and experimentally, we generalize the analysis of acquiring a company (Samuelson and Bazerman 1985) by allowing for competition of both, buyers and sellers. Naivety of both is related to the idea that higher prices exclude worse qualities. While competition of naive buyers...

We apply the property rights theory of Grossman-Hart-Moore in the music industry and study the optimal allocation of copyright between the artists who create music and the labels who promote and distribute it. Digital technology opens up a role for new intermediaries. We find that entry of...

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...

Customers of the online music label/store Magnatune can pay what they want for albums as long as the payment is within a given price range ($5-$18). On average, customers pay significantly more than they have to. We ran an online survey and collected responses from 227 frequent Magnatune...

Small firms are seen as important drivers of dynamics and innovation. They need to be particularly flexible and be able to react quickly to new challenges. This paper uses the latest change in dismissal protection legislation in Germany as a natural experiment and tries to find causal effects on...

In economic development, structural change among the three main sectors of an economy accompanies with aggregate economic growth. Nevertheless the question whether economic growth causes structural change or change in the economic structure causes aggregate growth is still unanswered. To shed...

This paper explores the relationship between knowledge creation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth in the United States over the last 150 years. According to the "new growth theory", investments in knowledge and human capital generate economic growth via spillovers of knowledge. But the...

In economic development, long-run structural change among the three main sectors of an economy follows a typical pattern with the primary sector (agriculture, mining) first dominating, followed by the secondary sector (manufacturing) and finally by the tertiary sector (services) in terms of...