Searching for the existence of entrepreneurial ecosystems: a regional cross-section growth regression approach

In this paper, we propose a method by which the entrepreneurial ecosystem, if present, reveals itself in the data. We first follow the literature and define the entrepreneurial ecosystem as a multidimensional set of interacting factors that moderate the effect of entrepreneurial activity on economic growth. The quality of such an ecosystem, by its multidimensionality, is impossible to measure directly. But so defined, we argue that variation in entrepreneurial ecosystem quality should result in variation in the estimated marginal effect of entrepreneurial activity on economic growth. Testing for such variation is possible using a combination of a multilevel growth regression and latent class analysis. We motivate and validate our approach in simulated data before illustrating its applicability in a data set covering 107 European NUTS1-2 regions across 16 EU member states. For this dataset, we cannot reject the hypothesis of a homogeneous contribution of entrepreneurship to regional growth. That is, in this dataset, we find no evidence of statistically significant heterogeneity in the estimated slope coefficients for entrepreneurial activity across regions. There are several possible explanations for this negative result. The two we deem most likely are first that the NUTS1-2 level may not be disaggregated enough to coincide with the relevant boundaries of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. We suspect our method would reveal significant differences across smaller geographical units, but the data unfortunately do not yet allow us to empirically test this hypothesis in a multi-country regional analysis. The second possible explanation is that the growth rates from 2006 to 2014 coincided with the global financial and the European crisis, and during this time, the effect of entrepreneurship on (long-run average) growth overall has been obscured. Our simulations also suggested a third reason. If measurement error is large (in the order of 33 or 0.015% point annual GDP-growth), the effects may also have been obscured.     

The geography of new firm formation: Evidence from independent start-ups and new subsidiaries in the Netherlands

This paper investigates to what extent determinants of the rate of independent start-ups and the rate of new subsidiaries are different. Using a regional database for the Netherlands over the period 1988–2002, we investigate the impact of two types of agglomeration effects, localization and urbanization, while controlling for a range of economic variables. We find urbanization economies to be particularly important for the creation of new subsidiaries while localization economies are more important for the creation of independent new ventures. Finally, the effect of agglomeration variables is found to be stronger for manufacturing industries compared to services industries.

Job-worker mismatch and cognitive decline

We have used longitudinal test data on various aspects of people'scognitive abilities to analyse whether overeducated workersare more vulnerable to a decline in their cognitive abilities,and undereducated workers are less vulnerable. We found thata job-worker mismatch induces a cognitive decline with respectto immediate and delayed recall abilities, cognitive flexibilityand verbal fluency. Our findings indicate that, to some extent,it is the adjustment of the ability level of the overeducatedand undereducated workers that adjusts initial job-worker mismatch.This adds to the relevance of preventing overeducation, andshows that being employed in a challenging job contributes toworkers’ cognitive resilience.