Israel M. Kirzner is the 2006 winner of The International Award for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research. In this essay, we present and evaluate his main contributions to the economics of entrepreneurship. The focus is on how Kirzner defines the entrepreneurial function. In order to...

Israel M. Kirzner is the 2006 winner of The International Award for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research (the FSF-Nutek Award). In this Prize Lecture he argues that a number of those who have commented on his work have misunderstood certain aspects of his theoretical system, and as a...

Israel M. Kirzner is the 2006 winner of The International Award for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research (the FSF-Nutek Award). In this Prize Lecture he argues that a number of those who have commented on his work have misunderstood certain aspects of his theoretical system, and as a...

The issue of what explains differences in the wealth of nations is one of the most classic in economics. We propose de facto academic freedom as an explanatory variable. The main idea is that such freedom allows for the development of new useful knowledge through research unconstrained by...

Previous research, notably Baumol (1990), has highlighted the role of institutions in channeling entrepreneurial supply into productive, unproductive or destructive activities. However, entrepreneurship is not only influenced by institutions - entrepreneurs often help shape institutions...

In this paper entrepreneurs are defined as agents who bring about economic change by combining their own effort with other factors of production in search of economic rents. The institutional setup is argued to determine both the supply and direction of entrepreneurial activity. Four key...

While entrepreneurship researchers agree that institutions ‘matter’ for entrepreneurship, they also have a rather encompassing understanding of institutions as almost any external factor that influences entrepreneurship. Ultimately, this literature thus comes up with a long list of...

Inventors generally know more about their inventions than what is written down in patent applications. Because they possess this tacit knowledge, inventors may need to play an active role when patents are commercialized. We build on Arora (1995) and model firm-inventor cooperation in the...