Open Access

This volume analyzes and assess seven key policy issues facing the European Union and the United States and suggest various policy solutions in order to make the U.S. and the EU more competitive in these key sectors. The term globalization has exploded in the literature since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The world is growing ever-more interconnected and because of world’s greater connectivity, there comes a slew of more problems, but also a greater variety of available policy solutions as countries can look to one another. This chapter addresses the effect that globalization has had, particularly on Europe and its partnership with the United States. Furthermore, the chapter introduces the seven topics to be discussed throughout the volume: income distribution, gender pay gap, crime and security, unemployment, health care, demographics, and environmental regulation.

Push factors associated with necessity entrepreneurship are largely neglected in the academic entrepreneurship literature. We link research on technology transfer to the literature on opportunity and necessity entrepreneurship, showing that the rate of academic spin-off creation is positively associated with the skilled unemployment rate. This longitudinal study of 559 spin-offs launched between 1999 and 2013, which controlled for several university- and context-level factors, showed that a higher level of unemployment reduced the probability of academic spin-off creation up to a threshold, beyond which the effect was reversed. By contrast, the relative skilled unemployment level was related positively to the probability of academic spin-off, particularly high-tech spin-off, creation. The relationship between the level of skilled unemployment and the creation of high-tech spin-offs was moderated positively by university research orientation and regional research and human capital intensity.

To achieve market and technology leadership, innovation is essential for niche market leaders. While research suggests that regions benefit economically from a high concentration of niche market leaders, it is still unclear which role locating close to one another plays for their innovation performance. Therefore, we contribute to existing literature that studies external factors of firm-level innovation. We analyze 1372 German niche market leaders and study whether (1) being located in a cluster improves their innovation performance and (2) if the impact of locating in a cluster varies depending on the diversity of industries within the cluster. We measured the spatial agglomeration using the location quotient. Our findings show that being located in a cluster increases the patenting rate by 1.49 times. This effect is more pronounced in clusters with more diverse industries, indicating a lower level of technology specificity. This suggests that technology specificity has an impact on a company’s ability to take advantage of positive knowledge from other companies in the same cluster. Finally, we conducted several tests to ensure the robustness of our analysis. The Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP) refers to the discretionary choice of the spatial unit, and we tested different spatial unit levels to account for this. Additionally, we used entropy balancing to confirm the positive effect of cluster location on innovation, comparing with a control set of mass-market firms. Our study concludes with implications for both corporate management and public policy.