Entrepreneurship and Institutions

In this paper entrepreneurs are defined as agents who bring about economic change by combining their own effort with other factors of production in search of economic rents. The institutional setup is argued to determine both the supply and direction of entrepreneurial activity. Four key institutions are explored more closely: property rights protection, savings policies, taxation and the regulation of labor markets. Institutions have far-reaching effects on entrepreneurship, and they largely determine whether or not entrepreneurial activity will be socially productive. Due to the responsiveness of entrepreneurship to the institutional setup it is maintained that in-depth analyses of specific institutions are required in order to further our understanding of the determinants of entrepreneurial behavior and the economic effects of entrepreneurship. The paper also demonstrates that it is problematic to use self-employment as an empirical proxy for productive entrepreneurship

Emotion Processes across the Menstrual Cycle

To what extent do explicit and implicit emotion processes and their neural underpinnings vary across the menstrual cycle in accordance with hormonal concentrations

The Effects of Childhood Adversity: Two Specific Neural Patterns

Childhood adversity (CA) is associated with an elevated risk of psychopathology across the lifespan and altered brain functions are thought to play an important role in linking CA to mental vulnerability. Previous research has proposed that CA generally influences emotion processing and particularly affects reward processing and cognitive control, yet convergent evidence for CA-related neural and functional networks underlying these processes remains to be fully understood. To investigate the impact of CA on functional brain activations, the present study performed Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) analyses across neuroimaging studies involving three task domains: emotion processing, cognitive control, and reward processing. ALE results revealed two significant CA-related convergences of activation in the left amygdala and insula. To better understand and characterize the functions of these clusters, we applied the Meta-Analytic Connectivity Modeling (MACM) approach to identify co-activation maps, and the functional decoding approach to reveal cluster-related psychological concepts. Results demonstrated two distinct neural and functional networks in CA: an amygdala-centered emotion processing network and an insula-centered somatomotor processing network. These specific neural patterns might indicate the effect of CA on multiple neural and functional networks engaged in sensory-motor and emotion processing functions. Our results provide insights into the neurobiological embedding associated with CA

An Innovation Policy Framework: Bridging the Gap between Industrial Dynamics and Growth

This paper examines policy measures that foster the creation of innovations with high inherent potential and that simultaneously provide the right incentives for individuals to create and expand firms that disseminate such innovations in the form of highly valued products. In so doing, we suggest an innovation policy framework based on two pillars: (i) the accumulation, investment, and upgrading of knowledge and (ii) the implementation of mechanisms that enable knowledge to be exploited such that growth and societal prosperity are encouraged. Knowledge is a necessary but far from sufficient condition for growth. To secure industrial dynamics and growth in the long term, institutions must be designed both to encourage sophisticated knowledge investments and to stimulate the creation, diffusion and productive use of knowledge in all sectors of the economy. We argue that the latter area has been overlooked in the policy discussion and that a coherent innovation policy framework must include tax policy, labor market regulation, savings channeling, competition policy, housing market regulation, and infrastructure to foster growth and future prosperity