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...

Edmund Phelps, the 2006 Nobel Laureate in Economics, has written a thought-provoking and ambitious book: Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change (Princeton University Press, 2013). The book is laudable for its emphasis on innovation, for its discussion of...

Recent studies document a 30-year decline in various measures of entrepreneurship in the United States. In contrast, using detailed Swedish employer-employee data over the period 1990-2013, we find no decline in Swedish entrepreneurial activity. Aggregate net job creation is greatest among the...

It is imperative that the economies of the European Union become more entrepreneurial to promote innovation and economic growth. To achieve these goals, we propose a reform strategy with respect to (i) the rule of law and the protection of property rights; (ii) the tax system; (iii) regulations...

There is a need for a conceptual approach that, with reference to explicit micro-level mechanisms and processes of industrial dynamics, articulates the role and function of entrepreneurial experimentation in innovation systems. This paper develops the concept of "entrepreneurial systems of...

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...

Venture capital has become a dominant form of innovation finance, used by many high-tech startups. Europe lags the U.S. in both VC activity and the creation of successful startups, and has recently been surpassed by China. Few European countries have rates of VC activity commensurable to their...

This paper examines employment and productivity dynamics in the Swedish business sector during the period 1996-2013. In order to analyze employment and productivity in a consistent way we apply a novel implementation of a method, which previously has been used extensively to analyze job...

We explore the effects of neighborhood-level ethnic enclaves on the propensity of immigrants to use business ownership as a vehicle to transcend from labor market outsiders to insiders. We exploit an exogenously partitioned grid of geocoded 1-by-1 km squares to approximate neighborhoods, and...

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...