Entrepreneurship and State Public Policy

Many state and local governments have focused on enacting policies to promote entrepreneurship in an effort to enhance economic growth. This paper will test the relationship between entrepreneurial activity and state economic freedom in a Granger causality framework. We build a panel data set of freedom scores and entrepreneurial activity measures within the fifty US states from 1981 to 2003, and our results show that, as a whole, economic freedom causes entrepreneurship. However, we find evidence that once entrepreneurs are in place, they increase the size of government spending, which is contradictory to economic freedom.