While the number of green start-ups has steadily increased around the world in response to the environmental problems demanding immediate solutions, there are several unresolved questions on the behaviour and performance of such ventures. The papers in this special issue shed light on these issues by underscoring the role of several factors, such as industry life cycles, knowledge spillovers, institutions, and availability of external finance, in shaping decision-making and firm behaviour in green start-ups. This paper highlights the state-of-the-art developments in the literature, discusses the key contributions of the papers put together in this special issue, and presents a future research agenda for scholars interested in green entrepreneurship.

This paper models the determinants of exporting (both in terms of export propensity and export intensity), with a particular emphasis on the importance of absorptive capacity and the endogenous link between exporting and undertaking R&D. Based on a merged dataset of the 2001 Community Innovation Survey and the 2000 Annual Respondents Database for the UK, our results suggest that establishment size plays a fundamental role in explaining exporting. Meanwhile, alongside other factors, undertaking R&D activities and having greater absorptive capacity (for scientific knowledge, international co-operation, and organisational structure) significantly reduce entry barriers into export markets, having controlled for self-selectivity into exporting. Nevertheless, conditional on entry into international markets, only greater absorptive capacity (associated with scientific knowledge) seems to further boost export performance in such markets, whereas spending on R&D no longer has an impact on exporting behaviour once we have taken into account its endogenous nature.JEL codes: L25; O24; O32; R11

In recent years, the role of human capital in economic development has been integrated with the concept of 'creative class'. To investigate the impact of creative occupations, the paper focuses on the jobs and career opportunities of individuals with high human capital in the creative disciplines (bohemian graduates). Using micro-individual student data by the Higher Education Statistical Agency, we highlight the mismatch between bohemian graduates and creative occupations and their low economic reward. The data question the role of bohemian graduates as agents of knowledge spillovers and highlight the need to differentiate between different type of human capital and job markets to better understand their influence on local growth. Copyright (c) 2010 the author(s). Journal compilation (c) 2010 RSAI.

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