Building on the notion of general and specific human capital proposed by Becker (1962), the paper highlights the importance of employee training practices undertaken in firms as an important tool for human resource and knowledge management and focuses on the role of works councils as a specific...

This paper analyzes whether firms conducting internal R&D and acquiring external high-tech equipment experience a complementarity effect. For German CIS data we conduct a complete set of indirect and direct complementarity tests refining the analysis by looking at various types of innovations...

There already exists broad literature investigating small and innovative firms in many respects. However, there have been few attempts to assess this group of firms ́propensity to patent or its patenting activities. This paper intends to fill that gap. By applying a new approach to account for...

From a macro perspective, inventor networks are characterized by rather stable structures. However, the high levels of fluidity of inventors and their ties found in reality contradicts this macro pattern. In order to explain these contradicting patterns, we zoom in on the intermediate group...

This paper constructs a Global Entrepreneurship Index (GEINDEX) that captures the contextual feature of entrepreneurship across countries. We find the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic development to be mildly S-shaped not U-shaped or L-shaped. Our findings suggest moving away...

The last decades saw a pronounced shift in innovation policy in Germany and many other countries towards increased funding of cooperative R&D. Over the last years, competitions between regional initiatives pushed this trend even further by adding a regional perspective, by increasing the scope...