This paper re-examines the link between new firm formation and subsequent employment growth. It investigates whether it is possible to have the 'wrong type of entrepreneurship' defined as new firm formation which leads to zero or even negative subsequent employment growth. It uses a very...

We study the role of the business cycle in the individual decision of own-account workers to hire employees. Using panel data from the European Community Household Panel for the EU-15 countries, we show that own-account workers are less likely to hire employees during recessions. Next, we focus...

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) is a research program executed annually with the aim to obtain internationally comparative high quality research data on entrepreneurial activity at the national level. This academic research consortium started as a partnership between the London...

Following a centuries-long decline in the rate of self-employment, a discontinuity in this downward trend is observed for many advanced economies starting in the 1970s and 1980s. In some countries the rate of self-employment appears to increase. At the same time, cross-sectional analysis shows a...

We investigate developments in business ownership rates in four CEE transition economies (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovak Republic), and compare them with similar developments in other OECD countries in the period 1989-2008. Our analysis reveals that business ownership rates in the...

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) is a research program executed annually with the aim to obtain internationally comparative high quality research data on entrepreneurial activity at the national level. This academic research consortium started as a partnership between the London...

The data set COMPENDIA contains harmonized data on the number of business owners and the size of the labour force for 23 OECD countries over the period 1972-2000, as well as the quotient of these two variables which is called the business ownership rate of a country. Business ownership rates...

Policy in developed countries is often based on the assumption that higher business ownership rates induce economic value. However, not everyone can be a business owner and many labour market participants would contribute more to economic value creation as an employee than a business owner. The...

This paper examines variations in entrepreneurship across twenty developed countries, using three measures of entrepreneurship which we broadly describe as prestart, early-stage and established enterprises. It then links these measures to the economic institutional framework, holding constant a...

Since several years EIM Business and Policy Research maintains a data base on business ownership rates across OECD countries, called COMPENDIA (COMParative ENtrepreneurship Data for International Analysis). EIM harmonizes raw numbers of business owners (self-employed), as published in the OECD...