Michaela Niefert

Gender differences in business success of German start-up firms

Many studies found that women-owned firms underperform. The performance gap might be attributed to gender differences in personal and firm characteristics affecting performance. This paper shall contribute to explain the female underperformance using data from the KfW/ZEW start-up panel. We track the performance of about 4,700 German start-up firms over up to four years after foundation. Sales, two measures of employment growth, and return on sales are used as performance indicators. We find that female-founded firms perform worse for the different performance indicators. At the same time, significant gender differences in many of the characteristics are observed. Compared to male entrepreneurs, female entrepreneurs have a lower level of formal education, less professional experience, are part of smaller start-up teams, are more often driven by necessity, and are overrepresented in the retail and service industries and in lower-tech industries in general. These differences can explain parts of female entrepreneurial underperformance.

The Mannheim Enterprise Panel (MUP) and firm statistics for Germany

The Mannheim Enterprise Panel (Mannheimer Unternehmenspanel – MUP) of the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) is the most comprehensive micro database of companies in Germany outside the official business register (which is not accessible to the public). The MUP is based on the firm data pool of Creditreform e.V., which is the largest credit rating agency in Germany. At the end of 2013, the MUP contained information on 7.7 Mio firms, of which about 3.2 Mio were still active. Comparisons of the active stock of firms in the MUP with the Business Register of the Federal Statistical Office indicate that the MUP gives by and large a representative picture of the corporate landscape in Germany. The MUP is a valuable database for analyzing the number of start�?ups and firm closures on a yearly basis for Germany. Further, the MUP is the sampling frame for the ZEW firm surveys and it is used for analyzing the development of firms over time.

Characteristics and Determinants of Start-ups from Unemployment: Evidence from German Micro Data

Abstract The study empirically analyzes the chazacteristics and determinants ofstart-ups from unemployment in Germany. Individual unemployment is shown to be an important push-factor for the transition to self-employment. The selection of the higher-educated into self-employment is stronger among the unemployed than among the employed. The educational level of formerly unemployed founders is compazable to those of other founders. Start-ups from unemployment have fewer employees on average and are mostly one-man firms. A large proportion of them are in less capital-intensive sectors characterized by a high level of competition. The smaller propensity of previously unemployed founders to invest and to take on employees can be attributed to their restricted access to finance and information on opportunities. Subsidising stazt-ups from unemployment with loans instead of grants and helping the unemployed to improve their abilities in opportunity recognition should enhance the quality of start-ups from unemployment.

Patenting Behaviour and Employment Growth in German Start-up Firms

The effect of innovations on employment at the firm level is theoretically ambiguous. The present paper analyses this relationship using panel data on German start-up firms as well as German patent data. It employs different indicators of patenting activity. By applying fixed-effects and first-differencing panel data methods it is shown that patenting activity has a positive effect on employment growth that is typically most pronounced in the second year after application. The effect seems to diminish with firm age. Patenting firms do not generally exhibit higher growth rates than their non-patenting counterparts; instead, growth performance depends on their patenting activity over time.

Gründerinnen auf dem Vormarsch? – Die Entwicklung der Beteiligung von Frauen am Gründungsgeschehen

ZusammenfassungDie Zahl der Frauen, die sich selbständig machen, sowie deren Anteil an allen Eintritten in die Selbständigkeit haben laut Mikrozensus seit Beginn der neunziger Jahre stark zugenommen. Die Zunahme beschränkt sich jedoch weitgehend auf selbständige Tätigkeiten, die ohne Beschäftigte und oft nur in Teilzeit ausgeübt werden. Laut Mannheimer Unternehmenspanel (MUP), das einen relativ eng abgegrenzten Unternehmensbegriff verwendet, geht der Anteil der Gründungen von Frauen seit 2003 leicht zurück. Die seit Ende der neunziger Jahre tendenziell rückläufige Entwicklung der Gründungszahlen macht sich bei Gründungen von Frauen noch etwas stärker bemerkbar als bei Gründungen von Männern. Die „Qualität“ der Gründungen von Frauen hat sich nur wenig verbessert. Es ist den Gründerinnen lediglich ansatzweise gelungen, vermehrt in wachstumsträchtige, männerdominierte Sektoren vorzudringen. Die Angleichung, die zwischen den Gründungen von Männern und Frauen bei Beschäftigungsgröße, Beschäftigungswachstum und Überleben zu beobachten ist, beruht hauptsächlich auf Verschlechterungen dieser Erfolgsgrößen bei den Gründungen von Männern.

Job Machine, Think Tank, or Both – What Makes Corporate Spinoffs Different?

One way through which knowledge and technology transfer can take place is through the foundation of new firms by former employees of incumbent private firms. In this paper, we examine whether knowledge transferred from the incumbent causally affect employment growth and post-entry innovation activities of the new firm. We focus on start-ups for which a new idea (a new product, technology, production process or management concept), which the founder developed during her work as an employee, was essential for setting up the new business. These firms are denoted corporate spinoffs. Using data from German start-ups founded in the period from 2005 to 2008, we apply nearest neighbour propensity score matching. We find that corporate spinoffs outperform other start-ups founded by former employees of incumbent private firms that are not based on an essential idea in terms of post-entry innovation activities. However, we cannot show that corporate spinoffs benefit from the transferred idea in terms of employment growth. We conclude that a transferred idea is primarily an input factor and a stimulus for subsequent post-entry innovation activities of corporate spinoffs.

Effects of patenting behavior on corporate growth: A panel data analysis of German start-up firms

The present paper examines the relationship between innovations and employment growth in start-up firms. Patent applications are used as an indicator of innovative activity, using a merged data set of German enterprise and patent data. By applying fixed-effects and first-differencing panel data methods, it is shown that patenting activity has a positive effect on employment growth in the second year after application. Patenting firms do not generally exhibit higher growth rates than their non-patenting counterparts; instead, growth performance depends on their patenting activity over time.