TY - JOUR

T1 - Regional characteristics, opportunity perception and entrepreneurial activities

AU - Stuetzer, Michael

AU - Obschonka, Martin

AU - Brixy, Udo

AU - Sternberg, Rolf

AU - Cantner, Uwe

N1 - Funding Information: Acknowledgments Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 50th Annual Congress of the European Regional Science Association (Jönköping, Sweden; 2010), the 8th AGSE International Entrepreneurship Research Exchange (Melbourne, Australia; 2011) and the 4th Global Entrepreneurship Research Conference, Imperial College, London (UK). Parts of this research were conducted while the first author was member of the DFG research training group 1411 ‘‘The economics of innovative change’’. The work of the second author on this study was supported by the PATHWAYS International Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme for the Comparative Study of Productive Youth Development (Jacobs Foundation) and the Center for Applied Developmental Science (CADS) of the Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena, Germany. The authors are grateful to Michael Fritsch, Per Davidsson and Veronique Schutjens for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Publisher Copyright: © 2013, Springer Science+Business Media New York. Copyright: Copyright 2019 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

PY - 2014/2

Y1 - 2014/2

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - Creative class

KW - Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM)

KW - Nascent entrepreneurship

KW - Opportunity perception

KW - Regional entrepreneurship

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84876389732&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/s11187-013-9488-6

DO - 10.1007/s11187-013-9488-6

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:84876389732

VL - 42

SP - 221

EP - 244

JO - Small business economics

JF - Small business economics

SN - 0921-898X

IS - 2

ER -