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This article investigates whether self-employed households use consumer loans - in particular, instalment loans and overdrafts - to finance business activities. Controlling for financial and nonfinancial household variables, we show that self-employed households particularly use personal overdrafts significantly more often than employee households. When analysing the correlation between consumer loan take-ups and consumption of self-employed in comparison to employee households, we find first evidence that overdrafts are used by self-employed to finance their business as well. This indicates that intermingling constitutes a financing strategy when regular business loans might not be accessible.
A rich literature links knowledge inputs with innovative outputs. However, most of what is known is restricted to manufacturing. This paper analyzes whether the three aspects involving innovative activity - R&D; innovative output; and productivity - hold for knowledge intensive services. Combining the models of Crepon et al. (1998) and of Ackerberg et al. (2015), allows for causal interpretation of the relationship between innovation output and labor productivity. We find that knowledge intensive services benefit from innovation activities in the sense that these activities causally increase their labor productivity. Moreover, the firm size advantage found for manufacturing in previous studies nearly disappears for knowledge intensive services.
We investigate whether people are more willing to become self-employed during boom periods or during recessions and to what extent business cycles and unemployment levels influence entries into entrepreneurship. Our analysis for Germany reveals that there is a positive relationship between unemployment rates and start-up activities. Moreover, new business formation is higher during recessions than in boom periods, implying that it is counter-cyclical. When disentangling periods of low and high unemployment we find that the effect of unemployment on new business formation is only statistically significant if the level of unemployment is below the trend, indicating a "low unemployment retain effect".
We analyze whether start-up rates in different industries systematically change with business cycle variables. Using a unique data set at the industry level, we mostly find correlations that are consistent with counter-cyclical influences of the business cycle on entries in both innovative and non-innovative industries. Entries into the large-scale industries, including the innovative part of manufacturing, are only influenced by changes in the cyclical component of unemployment, while entries into small-scale industries, like knowledge intensive services, are mostly influenced by changes in the cyclical component of GDP. Thus, our analysis suggests that favorable conditions in terms of high GDP might not be germane for start-ups. Given that both innovative and non-innovative businesses react counter-cyclically in ‘regular’ recessions, business formation may have a stabilizing effect on the economy.