Werner Bönte

Bergische Universität Wuppertal | Uni-Wuppertal, BUW · Schumpeter School of Business and Economics

In recent years, the use of experimentally validated self-reported items for the measurement of individuals' risk preferences has been on the rise. Although previous research has confirmed the convergent validity of such self-reported items, we argue that self-reported risk preference measures lack discriminant validity. That is, such measures may...

More attention must be paid to the multidimensional nature of competitiveness to better understand how competitiveness relates to personality and gender. We focus on three dimensions: Desire to Win (DW), Personal Development competitiveness (PD), and Enjoyment of Competition (EC). Our empirical exploratory analysis is based on a large sample of 152...

Referring to Isreal M. Kirzner (1973) and Joseph A. Schumpeter (1934), who emphasized the competitive nature of entrepreneurship, this study investigates whether potential and revealed entrepreneurs are more likely to seek competition than non-entrepreneurs. We provide a conceptual framework that links entrepreneurship to three facets of individual...

Having served under David at the Max Planck Institute in Jena, the authors witnessed first hand as he worked to build up entrepreneurship as an academic discipline. While he was building this community in the field writ-large, he was also building a strong network of entrepreneurship scholars within the team itself. While reflecting upon the benefi...

While previous studies demonstrated that, in many settings, women tend to be less willing than men to engage in interpersonal competition, this study focuses on selection into self competition. Competing against owns past performances can be an integral part of life, including job and sports. Using data obtained from a lab in the field experiment,...

The ratio of index finger length to ring finger length (2D:4D) is considered to be a putative biomarker of prenatal androgen exposure (PAE), with previous research suggesting that 2D:4D is associated with human behaviors, especially sex-typical behaviors. This study empirically examines the relationship between 2D:4D and individual competitiveness,...

This study examines the relationship between economic and psychological approaches to measure individuals’ competitiveness. While psychologists typically use self-reported psychometric scales, economists tend to use behavioral measures obtained from economic experiments, where subjects confronted with specific paid tasks have to self-select into ei...

Prior research suggests that trust plays an important role in an individual’s decision to participate in financial markets. This paper focuses on potential customers in retail banking markets and empirically investigates their trust in foreign banks and domestic banks. We argue that differences in customer trust can be related to three factors, nam...

This study examines the relationship between prenatal testosterone exposure (PTE) and selection into entrepreneurship. We argue that the relationship between PTE and entrepreneurial intent is positive and mediated by general and domain-specific risk-taking related to financial investment and professional career. Using the second-to-fourth digit rat...

This paper provides estimates for the price elasticity of demand in the European Power Exchange (EPEX) day-ahead market for electricity. An institutional change in the year 2010 allows us to use wind speed as an instrumental variable for hourly spot market prices in order to deal with potential endogeneity problems. The average price elasticity of...

This article provides new empirical evidence on gender differences in competitive preferences using a representative data set of more than 25 000 individuals from 36 countries. The empirical results show that the gender differences in competitive preferences are statistically significant in almost all countries, with women having, on average, a low...

Previous literature stressed on the gender differences in job satisfaction and the factors influencing the job satisfaction of men and women. Two rationales are usually provided for the finding that women tend to be relatively more satisfied with their jobs than men although disadvantaged in labour markets: first, women may have relatively lower ex...

This study highlights the relevance of gender differences in competitiveness for the gender gap in latent and nascent entrepreneurship. Using data obtained from a recent large-scale survey conducted in 36 countries, we find that individuals who like situations in which they compete with others are more likely to have a preference for being self-emp...

This study empirically investigates whether firms' improvements in energy and material efficiency are related to the extent to which external partners are involved in the development of process innovations. In particular, we distinguish three different process innovation strategies: firms may follow an ‘in-house strategy’ and develop their innovati...

While considerable concern has emerged about the links between religion and economic growth, little is actually known about how religion and social class impact the decision making of individuals. Using institutional theory and social dominance theory, this paper examines the influence of religion and social class on individuals' occupational choic...

This paper empirically investigates the relevance of social interaction and caste affiliation for individual awareness of financial instruments and investment behavior of households in India. The results of our empirical analysis, which is based on a large scale survey on saving patterns of Indians, suggest a positive relationship between financial...

External finance is a central issue for innovative nascent ventures. In this study, we argue that innovative nascent ventures may use patents to signal appropriability and prototypes to signal feasibility to potential investors. Using new data on 906 nascent ventures, we find that nascent ventures with patents or patent applications as well as prot...

This study explores the relationship between energy and material efficiency innovations (EMEIs) and innovation strategies employed by manufacturing firms to develop their process innovations. Firms may mainly develop process innovations in-house, let them mainly develop by other enterprises or institutions, or they or they may develop them jointly...

This paper studies the relationship between trade credit and innovation. Although trade credit is well researched in the finance literature, its link to innovation has been neglected in prior research. We argue that innovative small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are more likely to use trade credit than non-innovative SMEs because of credit co...

In this study we empirically investigate the contribution of personality traits to the gender gap in entrepreneurship. Our empirical analyses, which are based on data obtained from a large scale survey of individuals in 36 countries, suggest that a group of personality traits which we call Individual Entrepreneurial Aptitude (IEA) has a positive ef...

This paper empirically investigates the relevance of social interaction and caste affiliation for individual awareness of financial instruments and investment behavior in India. The results of our empirical analysis, which is based on a large scale survey on saving patterns of Indians, suggest a positive relationship between financial knowledge and...

This study contributes to understanding why some people but not others decide to start an own business. As part of a person’s personality, we focus on generalized beliefs about the efficacy respectively supportiveness of the self and of external factors. Using moderation and mediation arguments in a choice model, we suggest that a personality that...

As public research institutions are increasingly pressured to transfer research results to industry, evaluation of their performance is not only based on their scientific output but also on their commercialization success. Although it is well known that research cooperation activities are an important channel of knowledge transfer, the knowledge ab...

This paper examines the productivity effects of agglomeration on the economy-wide geographical scale for the U.S. economy. We calculate a spatial intensity index which takes into account changes in overall economic activity as well as changes in geographical distribution of economic activity. Using US data on metropolitan employment we find that sp...

abstractEmpirical studies based on individual data have found an inverse U-shaped relationship between age and the decision to start a business. Other studies have shown that becoming an entrepreneur is a regional event, with potential entrepreneurs benefiting from their local networks. This article links both strands of literature by introducing a...

In the past decade, entrepreneurship policies aimed at encouraging entrepreneurial activities in general and policies that aim at supporting the formation of knowledgebased start-ups in particular have been implemented in many industrial economies. The strong interest in knowledge-based start-ups might be explained by the fact that in a global econ...

Innovative new ventures fail if they cannot attract resources needed to commercialise new ideas and inventions. Obtaining external resources is a central issue for nascent entrepreneurs - people who are in the process of starting new ventures. We argue in this paper that, a way to deal with this problem is to signal appropriability and feasibility...

External finance is central for nascent entrepreneurs, people in the process of starting new ventures. We argue that nascent entrepreneurs use patents and prototypes in order to signal their ability to appropriate the returns from their innovation as well as the project's feasibility. Our analysis of 900 nascent entrepreneurs finds that patents and...

In this paper, we develop two hypotheses: First, regional innovation efforts have a positive impact on regional knowledge based entrepreneurial activity. Second, knowledge based entrepreneurship positively affects regional economic performance. We test these hypotheses using county level data from West Germany, employing a structural equation model...

This paper empirically examines the impact of knowledge spillovers and geographical proximity on inter-firm trust in buyer–supplier relations. In particular, the effects of incoming knowledge spillovers from vertically related firms and firms’ appropriability problems are analyzed. The results suggest that there is a positive relationship between i...

It is a common concern that pricing pressure by powerful buyers discourages suppliers' R&D investments. Employing a simple monopsonist - competitive upstream industry - framework, this paper qualifies this view in two respects. First, the monopsonist has an incentive to subsidize upstream R&D which yields more upstream R&D and higher profits in bot...

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 a...

A buyer’s technical knowledge may increase the efficiency of its supplier. Suppliers, however, frequently maintain relationships with additional buyers. Knowledge disclosure then bears the risk of benefiting one’s own rival due to opportunistic knowledge transmission through the common supplier. We show that in one-shot relationships no knowledge d...

While considerable concern has emerged about the impact of religion on economic development, little is actually known about how religion impacts the decision making of individuals. This paper examines the influence of religion on the decision for people to become an entrepreneur. Based on a large-scale data set of nearly ninety thousand workers in...

Innovative nascent entrepreneurs face the problem of obtaining finance, mainly due to information problems. We use new data on capital seeking start-ups allowing distinction between planning stage and early stage. Being innovative does not affect the probability of having external finance in the planning stage but has a positive effect in the early...

Some German states enjoy substantial privileges in the established system of horizontal fiscal trasnfers. This is due to an artificial inflating of population. Stimulated by a ruling of the Supreme Court, a study by Munich's ifo-institute argues that the degree of inflating is too high. We identify grave methodological and empirical shortcomings of...

Abuyer’s technical knowledge may increase the efficiency of its supplier.Suppliers, however, frequently maintain relationships with additional buyers. Knowledge disclosure then bears the risk of benefiting one’s own competitor due to opportunistic knowledge transmission through the common supplier. We show that in one-shot relationships no knowledg...

We investigate the determinants of firms' choices between different modes of vertical cooperation for innovation. Based on survey data on German innovating firms, we state that informal cooperation is both, more prevalent and more important than formal cooperation. We only find weak empirical evidence for the relevance of incoming knowledge spillov...

This paper investigates the effects of interindustry R&D spillovers from publicly financed business R&D on private R&D efforts and productivity using data of West German manufacturing industries. The results suggest that it is important to distinguish between the effects of spillovers from privately and publicly financed business R&D. In particular...

 This paper presents a case study on commissioned economic research in Germany. We find deplorable methodological and empirical shortcomings in a prominent study by Munich's ifo-Institute, on aspects of horizontal fiscal revenue sharing between German states. We suspect that this may not be an exceptional case but may point out problems of quality...

This article investigates the impact of various agglomeration forces on employment and innovation for a sample of aeronautical cluster firms in Northern Germany and a control group of geographically dispersed aeronautical firms in other German regions. The findings suggest that employment growth is positively affected by labor market pooling but th...

This paper investigates the impact of federally financed business R&D on productivity of the US nonfarm business sector. Results of a cointegration analysis suggest that a long run relation between productivity and total (privately and federally financed) R&D capital stock exists. Moreover, the estimation results do not confirm the finding of previ...

The paper explores the productivity effects of investment in external (contract) vs. internal (in-house) R&D in a sample of West-German Manufacturing Industries. The results provide strong evidence of a positive relationship between productivity and the share of external R&D in total R&D. This result is robust to alternative econometric specificati...

Zusammenfassung Interindustrielle F&E-Spillover senken die Produktionskosten derjenigen industriellen Sektoren, welche diese Spillover nutzen können. Zur Quantifizierung der Spillover-Effekte werden für fünf technologieintensive Sektoren des Produzierenden Gewerbes in Deutschland die sektoralen variablen Stückkostenfunktionen und die abgeleiteten K...

This paper examines the relevance of innovation for nascent entrepreneurs' financial decisions. High degrees of uncertainty, insufficient protection of intellectual property and asymmetric information may concern especially innovative start-ups. Innovative nascent entrepreneurs may therefore face the problem of obtaining external finance. We argue...

This paper analyses the relationship between regional economic performance and a region's endowment with knowledge and entrepreneurship capital. The analysis is based on a dataset comprising 145 European regions over the period from 2000 to 2003. The results of panel regressions suggest that there is a positive relationship between a region's total...

Recent empirical studies have shown that many employees would prefer to be self-employed, just as many nascent entrepreneurs are also in fulltime, paid employment. This paper investigates the factors determining individual preference for being self-employed, entrepreneurial intention and individual decision in taking steps to start a new venture. W...

We analyze the incentives for knowledge disclosure among verti- cally related firms. Two downstream firms decide whether they dis- close technical knowledge to a common upstream supplier. The down- stream firms' benefit arises because their knowledge lowers the costs of the supplier and in turn the input price. As a drawback, how- ever, the supplie...

This paper presents a case study on non-academic economic research in Germany. We find deplorable methodological and empirical shortcomings in a prominent study by Munich's ifoinstitute, which studies aspects of the federal legislation of transfer payments between German states. We suspect that this may not be an exceptional case but may point out...

This paper presents a case study on non-academic economic research in Germany. We find deplorable methodological and empirical shortcomings in a prominent study by Munich's ifo-institute, which studies aspects of the federal legislation of transfer payments between German states. We suspect that this may not be an exceptional case but may point out...

Based on a sample of 3869 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from 14 European countries we examine empirically the relationship be-tween innovation and trade credit. Our results suggest that innovative SMEs are more likely to receive trade credit from business partners than non-innovative SMEs. In particular, SMEs having upgraded an existing...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Universität Hamburg, 1999. Includes bibliographical references (p. 183-198).

Empirical studies based on individual data have found an inverse U-shaped relationship between age and the decision to start a business. Other studies have shown that becoming an entrepreneur is a regional event, with potential entrepreneurs benefiting from their local networks. This article links both strands of literature by introducing age-speci...