New Working Paper “The Entrepreneurial League Table of German Regions 1895 and 2019”

Custom Field Value: January 2, 2024

This new paper with Maria Greve and Michael Wyrwich describes and analyzes the long-term development of self-employment in German regions between 1895 and 2019. Based on rankings (“league tables”) for the two years, we identify those regions where the relative level of self-employment significantly increased (‘leapfroggers’), and those where the level of self-employment as compared to other regions deteriorated (‘plungers’). Germany is a particularly interesting case due to the turbulent history of the country over the 20th century including two lost World Wars, occupation by foreign armies, forty years of division into a capitalist and a socialist state, as well as re-unification and shock transformation of the eastern part to a market economy. While there is some persistence of regional self-employment despite all the disruptive changes, we also find and discuss considerable changes in regional levels of entrepreneurial activity. http://oweb.b67.uni-jena.de/Papers/jerp2023/wp_2024_001.pdf