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Small Business Economics

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01.02.2014 | Original Research

Regional characteristics, opportunity perception and entrepreneurial activities

verfasst von: Michael Stuetzer, Martin Obschonka, Udo Brixy, Rolf Sternberg, Uwe Cantner

Erschienen in: Small Business Economics | Ausgabe 2/2014

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Abstract

This article seeks to better understand the link between regional characteristics and individual entrepreneurship. We combine individual-level Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data for Western Germany with regional-level data, using multilevel analysis to test our hypotheses. We find no direct link between regional knowledge creation, the economic context and an entrepreneurial culture on the one side and individual business start-up intentions and start-up activity on the other side. However, our findings point to the importance of an indirect effect of regional characteristics as knowledge creation, the economic context and an entrepreneurial culture have an effect on the individual perception of founding opportunities, which in turn predicted start-up intentions and activity.

Vorheriger Artikel R&D investment of start-up firms: does founders’ human capital matter?

Nächster Artikel Bank support and export: evidence from small Italian firms

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We also acknowledge the potential role of individual human and social capital and do not ignore these variables, but use them as control variables to check for the robustness of the indirect effects via opportunity perception.

In 2007 Germany did not take part in the GEM 2007 cycle.

We use the Establishment History Panel of the IAB to compute start-ups at the regional level (Spengler 2008). For the technique of how to identify newly founded firms, see Fritsch and Brixy (2004). Note that in IAB databases start-ups are only taken into account if they employed at least one person, that is, subject to compulsory social insurance. This operationaliation of start-up activity deviates from GEM concepts such as Total Early-stage Entrepreneurship Activity (TEA) and arguably underestimates the level of entrepreneurial activity, because of the exclusion of entrepreneurs without employees and its focus on latter part of the entrepreneurial process. However, we use this data source because of its complete coverage providing us with a sufficient number of observations in all districts.

The choice of a 24-year time lag is governed by data availability. 1978 is the earliest year regional start-up rates can be computed from the IAB Establishment History Panel. Compared with 2002—the first year GEM data were available for this article—this results in a time lag of 24 years. Note that employing any shorter time lags or averages over a certain time period does not change the regression results as regional start-up rates do not vary much over time.

In order to compute the pseudo R ² in a multilevel setting, we follow recommendations of Snijders and Bosker (1999). According to them R ² is calculated by dividing the variance of the predicted residuals of the estimated model by the sum of (1) the variance of predicted residuals of the estimated model, (2) the level-2 variance and (3) the level-1 variance, which is equal to π ²/3 in a logistic model.

As this variable is now a dependent variable (instead of an individual-level predictor), we do not test a random coefficient model.

The respective results are available from the authors on request.

Due to space constraints, we do not report these regression results, but they are available from the authors on request.

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Titel: Regional characteristics, opportunity perception and entrepreneurial activities
verfasst von: Michael Stuetzer
Martin Obschonka
Udo Brixy
Rolf Sternberg
Uwe Cantner
Publikationsdatum: 01.02.2014
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Small Business Economics / Ausgabe 2/2014
Print ISSN: 0921-898X
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-0913
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-013-9488-6

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