Demography and Innovative Entrepreneurship

Werner Bönte (), Oliver Falck () and Stephan Heblich ()

No CESifo Working Paper No. 2115, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Group Munich

Abstract: Demographic change will be one of the major challenges for economic policy in the developed world in the next decades. In this article, we analyze the relationship between age structure and the number of startups. We argue that an individual’s decision to start a business is determined by his or her age and, therefore, that a change in a region’s age distribution affects the expected number of startups in the region. Using German regional data, we estimate a count-data model and find that the expected number of startups is positively influenced by the fraction of individuals of working age—20–64 years old. A more detailed analysis of the working-age distribution suggests that startups in knowledge-based (high-tech) manufacturing industries are affected by changes in this distribution whereas firms in other industries are not. In particular, increases in the fraction of individuals in the 20–30 age range and individuals in the 40–50 age range have a positive effect on the number of high-tech startups.

Keywords: demography; age distribution; entrepreneurship; innovation; region (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J10 L26 O30 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cesifo.de/DocCIDL/cesifo1_wp2115.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Demography and Innovative Entrepreneurship (2007)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_2115

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Group Munich
Address: Poschingerstrasse 5, 81679 Munich
Series data maintained by Julio Saavedra ().