Many governments promote small businesses for the dual reasons of fostering ‘breakthrough' innovations and employment growth. In this paper we study the effects of tax and subsidy policies on entrepreneurs' choice of riskiness of an innovation project and on their mode of commercializing the...

Existing empirical evidence suggests that entrepreneurs are optimists, a finding researchers often interpret as evidence of a behavioral bias in entrepreneurial decision-making. We revisit this claim by analyzing an unusually large survey dataset (180,814 responses) that allows us to create a...

By the late 1960s, real effective taxation of income from individual firm owner-ship in Sweden approached 100 percent. A series of tax reforms initiated in the late 1970s reversed this situation. This paper has a threefold purpose: (1) to elucidate the thinking behind the vision of creating a...

This paper investigates career choices of women who marry high-income men. We find that women married to men in the top of the income distribution are more likely to enter self-employment, which is also associated with a lower income. This can be interpreted as a career choice that produces a...