Mark WALTER JOHAN LOUIS Sanders

• PHD
• Professor at Maastricht University

Climate stabilization requires the mobilization of substantial investments in low- and zero-carbon technologies, especially in emerging and developing economies. However, access to stable and affordable finance varies dramatically across countries. Models used to evaluate the energy transition do not differentiate regional financing costs and there...

In The Entrepreneurial State and Mission Economy , Mazzucato argues that the state should adopt a proactive and entrepreneurial approach, setting ambitious missions that inspire collective action nurtured by emotions of urgency. By defining clear goals, the state can mobilize resources and talent from both the public and private sectors. We do not...

We study the local economic impacts of extreme weather events and the role of local finance in economic resilience. We use data on the physical intensities of extreme wind and precipitation events for 284 prefecture-level cities in China between 2004 and 2013. We estimate impulse response functions using a bias-corrected method of moments estimator...

Plain English Summary Entrepreneurship research questions the core assumptions of other academic fields and legitimizes them both practically and academically. Since the 1980s, entrepreneurship research has seen tremendous growth and development, establishing itself as an academic field. Entrepreneurship is also taught extensively in leading busine...

As the energy transition accelerates and renewable energy technologies become cost-competitive with fossil fuels in many countries, the availability of finance could become a bottleneck. Integrated assessment models (IAM) and other macro-economic transition (MET) models typically do not feature detailed financial markets and do not sufficiently con...

In this chapter, I argue that the COVID pandemic brings home the message that economies need to be prepared for shocks. But preparing for shocks is not the same as preparing for the last shock. Instead, it means we also need to prepare for unknown unknowns. I then argue that the transition to an entrepreneurial society is a no-regret strategy to do...

How do weather anomalies affect the economy at the local level? This paper presents a new data set that links weather data to annual average night-light emission data for 24.000 0.5°× 0.5° grid-cells around the globe for the period 1992–2013. Interpreting night-light emission as a proxy for economic activity, these data allow one to investigate how...

This paper examines how banks adjust their asset structure in response to changes in loan demand following natural disasters. We demonstrate how banks’ asset diversification strategy helps clients smooth consumption and supports local recovery. In the empirical section, we apply the difference-in-differences method and determine that U.S. commercia...

In this paper we first propose a proxy for early stage activity in a country’s exports based on product life cycle theory. Employing a conditional latent class model, we then examine the relationship between this measure and economic growth for 93 countries during the period 1988–2005. We find that the impact of early stage activity differs across...

Cost of capital is an important driver of investment decisions, including the large investments needed to execute the low-carbon energy transition. Most models, however, abstract from country or technology differences in cost of capital and use uniform assumptions. These might lead to biased results regarding the transition of certain countries tow...

Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) has been recognized as an important means of mitigating global climate change, but apart from several pilots, it has not yet been successfully implemented on the large scale needed to live up to the expectations as a mitigation method. In Netherlands, the option of CCS has been the subject of debate for a long...

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-021-00467-8

Numerous studies have presented scenarios regarding energy transition, including the computation of investment costs in various models. Although these studies project detailed investment pathways for different technologies, they do not distinguish between different sources of and types of funding. They tell us what the transition will cost, but not...

Samenvatting Welke handelings- en interventiestrategieën van gemeenten dragen bij aan perspectief op werk en een verbetering van het welbevinden en vertrouwen van mensen in de bijstand? Zes gemeenten – Groningen, Utrecht, Tilburg, Wageningen, Deventer en Nijmegen – hebben de afgelopen jaren (van 1 oktober 2017 tot 31 december 2019) unieke randomise...

In this paper, we use standard scenarios focussing on renewable energy, energy efficiency and grid investments and take stock of the literature and quantitative data on available sources of financing for clean energy to qualitatively match supply and demand of specific sources of finance. Our analysis shows that under the current investment and len...

We evaluate how country-level entrepreneurship—measured via the national system of entrepreneurship—triggers total factor productivity (TFP) by increasing the effects of Kirznerian and Schumpeterian entrepreneurship. Using a database for 45 developed and developing countries during 2002–2013, we employ non-parametric techniques to build a world tec...

Mobilization of valuable resources, especially of talented individuals, figures prominently in firms’ strategies and policy agendas. Thus far, there is a dearth of empirical evidence in the field. The contribution of this paper is two-pronged: first, to perform an integral evaluation of the different factors that shape the mobility of patent invent...

In this chapter we outline a reform strategy to promote an entrepreneurial society in the UK. To put it in the words of the Varieties of Capitalism framework, the UK today represents a distinct liberal market economy with a deregulated environment, flexible labor markets, well-funded elite universities, and strong protection of intellectual propert...

In this chapter, we outline a reform strategy to promote an entrepreneurial society in Italy. From a Varieties-of-Capitalism perspective, Italy has been classified as a Mixed or Mediterranean Market Economy. It boasts a vibrant entrepreneurial economy of locally embedded, often family-owned small- and medium-sized firms that make up a major share o...

In this chapter, the editors conclude this volume and draw the most important lessons that can be drawn from the FIRES project. The editors highlight theoretical lessons, methodological innovations, and policy implications.

In this chapter, the editors introduce and motivate the approach in this volume. Although this volume brings together contributions from different authors, the chapters all flow directly from the work that was done in the European H2020 research project Financial and Institutional Reforms for the Entrepreneurial Society that was conducted between 2...

In this chapter, we outline a reform strategy to promote a more entrepreneurial society in Germany. Germany has developed a successful model of capitalism in which high productivity growth is driven by on-the-job learning and firm-specific skill accumulation. The economy is rooted in a strong and regionally embedded Mittelstand, which supports an e...

This open access book is an outcome of the EU’s Horizon 2020 project ‘Financial and Institutional Reforms for an Entrepreneurial Society’ (FIRES). Building on historical, economic and legal analysis, and combining methods and data across disciplines, the authors provide policymakers, stakeholders and scholars with valuable new tools for assessing a...

Cities are challenged with increasing population growth and need to implement smart solutions to become more resilient to economic, environmental, and social challenges posed by ongoing urbanization. This study reviewed business model development frameworks and developed a practical tool to help cities assess business models by adapting components...

A latent class model is applied to allow entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) to influence the effect of entrepreneurial activity on growth in European Union regions. Using this methodology, clusters of regions that differ significantly in their relationship between entrepreneurial activity and growth are identified. This is consistent with the hypothe...

Mark Sanders, chapter author, discusses David’s key role in the advancement in academic thought regarding the creation, promotion, and maintenance of an entrepreneurial society. Highlighting key contributions that David made to the entrepreneurship literature, Sanders details the manner in which this concept has developed. Again, David accounts for...

Property rights protection and the rule of law are arguably the most fundamental economic institutions of any society. They form the foundation of any entrepreneurial ecosystem and affect the effectiveness of collaborative innovation blocs. To promote an entrepreneurial society, there is therefore no alternative but to ensure that these foundationa...

The European Union suffers from an innovation deficit, which must be remedied if the EU is to improve the quality of life of its citizens and remain competitive in the global marketplace. We explain why productive entrepreneurship is a way towards restoring inclusive, innovative, and sustainable growth in Europe before presenting the theoretical fr...

To promote innovation and economic growth in the European Union, we have outlined a reform strategy with respect to the institutions and policies that matter the most for fostering a productive entrepreneurial economy. Here, we conclude by summarizing all the previous chapters and discussing how the 50 proposals presented can be used as building bl...

New, innovative business venturing hinges on the creation and mobilization of human capital and knowledge. The proposals in this chapter aim to strengthen and expand the European knowledge space in which Europe’s entrepreneurs build their ventures. Reforms to improve the production and flow of knowledge touch on educational systems, research instit...

In providing incentives and rewards, the tax system matters greatly for innovative entrepreneurial venturing. Because a host of different taxes affect entrepreneurship, we discuss reforms in several areas, including labor, capital, corporate, and private wealth taxation. The most important principles an entrepreneurial tax system should enshrine ar...

Increasing the availability of skilled labor to small and innovative ventures is imperative if entrepreneurship and innovation are to flourish within the European Union. Building up a qualitatively and quantitatively fitting labor force is always a challenge for new, growing ventures, but Europe’s labor market and social security systems tend to cr...

Opening up European markets for goods and services would put European entrepreneurs at an equal footing with incumbent firms. For entrepreneurial venturing both market entry and exit are of crucial importance and the European Union has strong legal competencies in these areas, following the treaties to build the European Common Market. However, esp...

To promote an entrepreneurial society, many of the institutions that mobilize and allocate savings and financial resources in the European Union must be reformed. The proposals in this area seek to address the bias against small, innovative, and young ventures in Europe’s financial markets, dominated by banks and large pension funds. These intermed...

This open access book builds on the European Union’s (EU) Horizon 2020 project ‘Financial and Institutional Reforms for an Entrepreneurial Society’ (FIRES). The authors outline how Europe can move towards more inclusive, innovative and sustainable growth through reforms that will rekindle its entrepreneurial spirit. Based on decades of research and...

Institutions have a decisive impact on the prevalence and nature of entrepreneurship. To date, the impact of institutions on (productive) entrepreneurship and the effects of entrepreneurship on economic growth have largely been investigated in isolation. In this paper, we bring together institutions, entrepreneurship, and economic growth using a pa...

In this paper, we introduce the special issue on Financial and Institutional Reforms for an Entrepreneurial Society in Europe. There are many reasons for Europe to want to make the transition to a more Entrepreneurial Society. And for decades now, policy makers are trying to bring that transition about with variations on the “educate, deregulate an...

To achieve the transition toward a green economy, policy makers are required to redirect abundant financial resources into green tech innovations. Theoretically, policy makers have a menu of options ranging from technology-push support in the invention stage to market-pull mechanisms supporting the commercialization and diffusion of green technolog...

Diversity makes the financial system more resilient. In addition, there is a diverse investment demand to make the transition to a more sustainable energy system. We need, among others, investment in energy transition, circular resource use, better water management and reducing air pollution. The two are linked. Making the financial system more div...

Entrepreneurs and investors face challenges in the ‘thin market’ for early stage entrepreneurial finance. Improving the situation has been a priority of policy makers for at least a decade, however, the challenges in this matching process are still poorly understood. Theory suggests that matching problems may originate in different perceptions in a...

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...

In this chapter, we investigate the knowledge production function, using the Community Innovation Survey, an unbalanced firm-level panel data set collected in the Netherlands between 1994 and 2004. This database allows us to span the entire innovation process from initial resources committed (R&D labor and the accumulated knowledge stock) to the fi...

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) could be an interesting option to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions in the Netherlands. This study compares a mitigation strategy for the Dutch power sector that includes CCS to one without on several socio-economic indicators. In particular, we calculate incremental gross value added (GVA), employment and import de...

In this chapter, we outline the basic mechanisms in endogenous growth theory that identify knowledge creation and diffusion as the core driver of economic growth. Then we discuss how new economic geography, urban economics, organizational science, and entrepreneurship theory have regionalized the mechanisms involved. Knowledge creation, however, ha...

Investors have typically been hesitant to commit resources to the decarbonization of energy productionas CCS investments combine large up-front investment outlays, a long planning horizon, different sources of uncertainty and irreversibility of the capital expenditure. The real option literature offers a vast amount of models to handle investment d...

Skill-biased technical change occupied empirical economists for much of the 1990s. The empirical literature firmly established a positive correlation between technology indicators and demand shifts. In the minds of many, that has established a causal relationship. This leap of faith, however, is at odds with Hicks's conventional wisdom that endogen...

Empirical research has revealed some regularities regarding the innovation that takes place over the industry life-cycle. First, innovation is high when an industry is young and low when the industry matures, and second, product innovation decreases with industry maturity, while process innovation increases. The implications of these regularities a...

Entrepreneurship is generally regarded as a productive force of change, innovation, and development in modern economies. Particularly for institutionally less developed environments, however, it has been argued that the same energy and talent can also be allocated to unproductive ends. In this article, we present a model that analyzes the allocatio...

This paper challenges the key assumption in "idea based growth models" that innovation rents ultimately reward the creation of knowledge. In modern capitalist economies the agents that commercialize new ideas, the entrepreneurs, receive the bulk of the innovation rents and are generally the residual claimant. We develop a model that separates inven...

We develop an endogenous-growth model in which we distinguish between inventors and innovators. This distinction implies that stronger protection of intellectual property rights has an inverted U-shaped effect on economic growth. Intellectual property rights protection attributes part of the rents of commercial exploitation to the inventor that wou...

In this paper we first propose a proxy for the maturity of a country’s export bundle based on product life cycle theory. Employing a conditional latent class model, we then examine the effect of maturity of countries’ exports on their economic growth for 98 countries over the period 1988 to 2005. We find that this effect is different across three e...

This paper reassesses the causal relationship between per capita energy use and gross domestic product, while controlling for capital and labour (productivity) inputs in a panel of 30 OECD countries over the past 40 years. The paper uses panel unit root and cointegration testing and specifies an appropriate vector error correction model to analyse...

Industrialization has long been seen as the answer to underdevelopment and poverty. First this led countries to follow protectionist import substitution policies but as these failed developing countries have opened up to trade and FDI and tried to follow strategies of export driven industrialization. If we consider the share of non-OECD countries i...

The article tracks potential employees (team members), university scientists (advisors) and venture capitalists (investors) who participated in a two-day workshop at Stanford University. The three groups are identified as either having preexisting professional interactions with the other two groups prior to attending the initial workshop, or having...

Oil price volatility harms economic growth. Diversifying into different fuel types can mitigate this effect by reducing volatility in fuel prices. Producing bio-fuels may thus have additional benefits in terms of avoided damage to macro-economic growth. In this study we investigate trends and patterns in the determinants of a volatility gain in ord...

Talent allocation models assume that entrepreneurially talented people are selfish and thus allocate into unproductive or even destructive activities if these offer the highest private returns. This paper experimentally analyses selfish preferences of the entrepreneurially tal- ented. We find that making a distinction between creative talent and bu...

Entrepreneurship is generally regarded as a force of change, innovation, and development in modern economies. Entrepreneurs bring new and better products to markets, restore allocative efficiency through arbitrage and reinvest their profits. However,

Talent allocation models assume that entrepreneurial talent is selfish and thus allocates into unproductive or even destructive activities if these offer the highest private returns. This paper experimentally analyzes other-regarding preferences of entrepreneurial talent. We find that making a distinction between creative talent and business talent...

Entrepreneurship is generally regarded as a force of change, innovation and development in modern economies. Entrepreneurs bring new and better products to markets, restore allocative efficiency through arbitrage and reinvest their profits. However, as Baumol (1990), Mehlum et al. (2003) and Acemoglu (1995) have argued, the same energy and talent c...

In this paper we present an endogenous growth model in which we investigate the implications of knowledge spillovers between knowledge creators (inventors) and commercializers (innovators). We then turn to the question how such knowledge spillovers affect value creation within and among organizations as well as at the aggregate level and discuss ho...

Burgess (1993) finds that job finding rates for the unemployed do not move proportionately to changes in the overall hiring rate. Burgess hints at employed job seekers that start looking in tight conditions and crowd out the unemployed. But he leaves the search behaviour of firms unaddressed. Russo et al. (2000) and Russo et al. (2001), however, sh...

We develop a model in which stronger protection of intellectual property rights has an inverted U-shaped effect on innovation. Intellectual property rights protection allows the incumbent firms to capture part of the rents of commercial exploration that would otherwise accrue to the entrepreneurs. Stronger patent protection will increase the incent...

This paper presents a model of the life cycle that drives and is driven by R&D. In the model, firms have the option to improve their quality or to invest R&D resources in efficiency gains. Faced with this tradeoff, young firms opt for quality instead of efficiency improvements, whereas more mature firms will do both. This switch is endogenous and d...

This paper argues that recent trends in the global economy have led to a shift in developed countries’ comparative advantage from mature industrial to early stage entrepreneurial production. We develop a three stage product life cycle model in which we distinguish between life cycle stages characterized by new, mature and off-shored production. In...

In this paper I present a model of economic growth that combines insights from endogenous growth theory, the field of entrepreneurship research and the philosophy and economics of science. The model is built on three relatively standard assumptions and a Kuhnian approach to scientific knowledge accumulation. I assume that innovation generates econo...

We formulate a model that explicitly separates two functions in the innovation process: The introduction of new goods and the quality improvement of existing goods. While the latter is performed by the corporate R+D sector, the first is performed by entrepreneurs. We show that in a three sector economy, which also includes a producing sector, there...

In this paper I will focus exclusively on opportunity in the narrow sense and therefore on the origin of the required knowledge. For the purpose of this paper an opportunity exists when all reqiured elements of knowledge are "out there" and await the arrival of a keen entrepreneur to recognize, combined and exploit them. The origin of knowledge is...

This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection a...

The labour market position of low skilled workers has deteriorated dramatically over the 80s and early 90s. Awell-known manifestation of this deterioration is the rise in relative high-skilled wages observed in the UnitedStates. It is a well-documented fact that demand shifts underlie this deterioration and several studies indicate thattechnical ch...

The structure of wages and employment has shifted against the low-skilled in many OECD countries over the last decade. Many authors have attributed this shift to the impact of new technologies, and or technical change in general. This paper investigates and structures the growing body of literature on skill-biased technical change (SBTC) by first p...

In this article we present a model with two levels of skills and two classes of goods, one produced with a technology requiring high skills, the other produced with a technology that can be operated by both low and high skilled workers. In this model skill biased technical change causes a drop in the demand for low skilled workers. The model, howev...