While previous research documents a negative relationship between government size and economic growth, suggesting an economic cost of big government, a given government size generally affects growth differently in different countries. As a possible explanation of this differential effect, we...

Existing studies of entrepreneurship focus on entrepreneurs whose individual contribution to wealth creation is typically trivial: self-employed persons. This paper investigates entrepreneurs whose individual contribution to wealth creation is enormous: billionaires. We explore the relationship...

Commentators on the private equity industry often claim that favorable tax treatment gives private equity firms advantages in the market for corporate control. But we show that tax advantages do not affect the equilibrium ownership of corporate assets when acquisition costs are fully deductible...

Empirical studies of the relation between government size and economic growth come to widely different conclusions. In part this may reflect the fact that many studies report regressions that contain severe multicollinearity, heteroscedasticity, simultaneity and other specification problems....

This paper studies determinants of income inequality using a newly assembled panel of 16 countries over the entire twentieth century. We focus on three groups of income earners: the rich (P99-100), the upper middle class (P90-99), and the rest of the population (P0-90). The results show that...

Does tax policy affect the rate of self-employment in a modern welfare state? This question is analyzed empirically based on Swedish data for the entire post-war period. Available tax data indicate that payroll taxes have had a negative influence on the unincorporated rate of self-employment,...

In a recent review article Jonas Agell, Thomas Lindh and Henry Ohlsson (1997) claim that theoretical and empirical evidence does not allow any conclusion on whether there is a relationship between the rate of economic growth and the size of the public sector. They illustrate their conclusion...

Several recent articles claim that pre-tax income equlity promotes growth. Equality is argued to dampen demand for redistributive economic policies that tax returns to growth-enhancing activities such as investment. These results rest heavly on the assumption that pre-tax income equality is an...