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Prior research investigates the role of start-up costs and taxes with regard to entrepreneurship. Yet, little distinction is made regarding the type of entrepreneurship, particularly innovative versus non-innovative entrepreneurship. We shall argue that start-up costs and taxes are associated in different ways with innovative versus non-innovative entrepreneurship. Taxes being recurring costs should mainly relate to innovative entrepreneurship, whereas start-up costs being one-off costs should mainly relate to non-innovative entrepreneurship. Analyzing a dataset of 632,116 individuals, including 43,223 entrepreneurs from 53 countries, we can partially confirm our predictions. Corporate taxes show a negative relationship with innovative entrepreneurship, whereas income taxes seem to have no relationship. High start-up costs have a positive relationship with innovative entrepreneurship, although this finding only holds true in cross-sectional investigations. Our paper contributes to the discussion on how governmental regulation and taxes relate to entrepreneurship.

The extent to which the goals and contents of (compulsory) education should to be regulated has been a complicated balancing act in the Netherlands. Against a background of a longstanding statutory tradition of freedom of education, governmental decisions about 'what knowledge is of most worth' have been delicate. The purpose of the analysis described in this article is to disentangle, interpret and discuss this complicated balancing act between curriculum regulation and curriculum freedom during the past 40 years and to learn from other countries by putting the results into a wider European curriculum policy perspective. The contribution will end with discussing issues that need to be carefully considered with respect to the recent Dutch policy shift towards output regulation by means of mandatory achievement tests for mathematics, mother tongue and English at the end of lower secondary education.

We empirically investigate the role of natural resources, and governance in explaining variation in the intensity of conflict during the 1991–2002 civil war in Sierra Leone. As a proxy for governance quality we exploit exogenous variation in political competition at the level of the chieftaincy. As a proxy for resources we use data on the location of pre-war mining sites. Our main result is that neither governance nor resources robustly explains the onset or duration of violence during the civil war in Sierra Leone.

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 and finance" approach to entrepreneurship. We argue that more fundamental reforms are required to improve the entrepreneurial ecosystem and bring about this transition. We then discuss the 12 contributions that pertain to five different facets of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. The first two papers address the most fundamental institutional foundations of the ecosystem. The next three papers discuss the (lack of) access to knowledge and incentives to start innovative entrepreneurial ventures. That is followed by three papers that focus on the institutions that (fail to) channel financial resources to such ventures and two papers that analyze the relevance of labor market institutions. The special issue concludes with two papers investigating how the interplay of institutions and productive entrepreneurship results in economic growth.

The profitability of the French agricultural sector has fallen over the last two decades, leading to the suggestion of a "rupture in technical progress". Additionally, the intellectual property regime in force has contributed to the erosion of the cultivated biodiversity, limiting plant resiliency to climate change and other hazards. In the face of these challenges, agroecological farming practices are a viable alternative. This paper investigates the positive and negative aspects associated with the development of alternative seed procurement networks in France. The findings indicate that peasant seed networks can effectively contribute to overcoming many of the structural blockages with which French agriculture is confronted, but that yield concerns; higher information and supervisory costs, as well as the unfavourable legislative context, constitute key challenges to their development. However, these could be partially or totally eliminated if adequate policies are implemented. In this regard, the recommendations are to: (i) strengthen the dialogue with farmers in the shaping of policies related to the use of plant genetic resources; (ii) abrogate the "obligatory voluntary contribution" on farm-saved seeds; (iii) diversify the collection of Centres for Biological Resources, increase their number, and democratize their access; (iv) harmonize the French and European regime on intellectual property; and (v) encourage participatory research

This article reports the results of a controlled field experiment designed to estimate the short-term effects of a 45-minute financial education program on the financial literacy and savings behavior of children in Dutch primary schools. Among fifth and sixth graders, the program led to a pre- to posttest improvement in financial literacy on almost one of eight questions, with about one-third of the increase in correctness attributable to the program. It also raised the probability of willingness to save by 4 percentage points. Nonetheless, whereas the program appears effective in respect to questions that explicitly address program content, its significant effects on financial literacy seem primarily driven by the results for girls, although we cannot reject homogeneous treatment effects with respect to gender.

Today, as an increasing share of women and men is involved in both paid tasks at work and unpaid care tasks for children and other relatives, more people are at risk of work-family conflict, which can be a major threat to well-being and mental, but also physical health. Both organizations and governments invest in arrangements that are meant to support individuals in finding a balance between work and family life. The twofold goal of our article was to establish the level of work-family conflict in the member states of the European Union by gender and to analyze to what extent different arrangements at the organizational level as well the public level help to reduce this. Using the EuropeanWorking Conditions Survey supplemented with macro-data on work-family facilities and the economic and emancipation climate in a country, we performed multilevel analyses. Our findings show that the intensity of work-family conflict does not vary widely in EU28. In most countries, men experience less work-family conflict than women, although the dierence is small. Caring for children and providing informal care increases perceived work-life conflict. The relatively small country dierences in work-family conflict show that dierent combinations of national facilities and organizational arrangements together can have the same impact on individuals; apparently, there are several ways to realize the same goal of work-family conflict reduction.

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 parsimonious growth model in a 3SLS specification. In our first stage, we regress multiple measures of entrepreneurial activity on institutional proxies that are known to correlate with more productive forms of entrepreneurial activity. Using the fitted values of this first-stage regression as our proxy for productive entrepreneurship, we can then estimate a panel growth regression following Islam (1995) in a second stage. The third stage then optimizes the estimation of the two equations simultaneously. Our results show that productive entrepreneurship contributes to economic growth. In our set of proxies for institutional quality, financial stability, small government, and perceived start-up skills are the most important predictors of such productive entrepreneurship.

We propose a stochastic indicator to assess government debt sustainability. This indicator combines the effect of economic uncertainty –represented by stochastic simulations of interest and growth rates– with the expected fiscal response that provides information on the long-term country specific attitude towards fiscal sustainability. We apply our framework on post-war data for nine OECD countries and find that our indicator –the potential increase in debt in bad states of the world– distinguishes countries that have sustainability concerns: Italy, Spain, Portugal and Iceland, from those that do not: United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.

Why do regional governments establish venture capital funds? Government intervention in venture capital markets is traditionally legitimised by market failure rationales. In this paper, we analyse the supply of public and private venture capital in Dutch regions, which reveals a multiplicity of rationales for government intervention in the regional economy. We ground this in the policy diffusion literature and distinguish four rationales for government intervention: economic competition, coercion, imitation and learning. The findings enrich the analysis of regional government interventions and challenge the rhetoric that regional policies seeking to foster venture capital markets are solely implemented to address market failures.

Why do regional governments establish venture capital funds? Government intervention in venture capital markets is traditionally legitimised by market failure rationales. In this paper, we analyse the supply of public and private venture capital in Dutch regions, which reveals a multiplicity of rationales for government intervention in the regional economy. We ground this in the policy diffusion literature and distinguish four rationales for government intervention: economic competition, coercion, imitation and learning. The findings enrich the analysis of regional government interventions and challenge the rhetoric that regional policies seeking to foster venture capital markets are solely implemented to address market failures.

The increasing frequency and severity of natural catastrophes due to climate change is expected to cause higher natural disaster losses in the future. Reinsurance companies bear a large share of this risk in the form of excess-of-loss coverage, where they underwrite the most extreme portion of insurers' risk portfolios. Past experience has shown that after a very large natural disaster, or multiple disasters in close succession, the recapitalization need of reinsurers could trigger a "hard" reinsurance capital market, where a high demand for capital increases the price charged by investors, which is opposed to a "soft" market, where there is a high availability of capital for reinsurers. Consequently, the rising costs of underwriting are transferred to insurers, which ultimately could trigger higher premiums for natural catastrophe (NatCat) insurance worldwide. Here, we study the vulnerability of riverine flood insurance systems in the EU to global reinsurance market conditions and climate change. To do so, we apply the "Dynamic Integrated Flood Insurance" (DIFI) model, and compare insurance premiums, unaffordability, and the uptake for soft and hard reinsurance market conditions under an average and extreme scenario of climate change. We find that a rising average and higher variance of flood risk towards the end of the century can increase flood insurance premiums and cause higher premium volatility resulting from global reinsurance market conditions. Under a "mild" scenario of climate change, the projected yearly premiums for EU countries, combined, are ¿1380 higher under a hard compared to a soft reinsurance capital market in 2080. For a high-end climate change scenario, this difference becomes ¿3220. The rise in premiums causes problems with the unaffordability of flood coverage and results in a declining demand for flood insurance, which increases the financial vulnerability of households to flooding. A proposed solution is to introduce government reinsurance for flood risk, as governments can often ...

Why would a small country like the Netherlands become active in space? The field was monopolized by large countries with large military establishments, especially in the early years of spaceflight. Nevertheless, the Netherlands established a space program in the late 1960s. In this paper I will analyze the backgrounds of Dutch space policy in international post-war politics, national industrial policy, and science. After the Second World War, European space activities were shaped by the interplay between transatlantic and European cooperation and competition, limited by American Cold War diplomacy. At the national level, the Dutch space program was shaped firstly by two powerful companies, Philips electronics and Fokker Aircraft. As I will demonstrate, these two firms sought to gain crucial management skills as well as technological ones. Meanwhile, the nation's astronomers were able to capitalize on an advantageous confluence of political, economic and scientific ambitions to forward their own agenda. They succeeded in obtaining two of the most expensive scientific instruments ever built in the Netherlands: the Astronomical Netherlands Satellite (ANS, launched 1974) and the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS, 1983). Both were joint Dutch-American missions, but the nature of the cooperation on each was very different, reflecting the changing relationship between America and Western Europe from the 1950s until the 1980s.