Entrepreneurship policy mainly aims to promote innovative “Schumpeterian” entrepreneurship. However, the rate of entrepreneurship is commonly proxied using quantity-based metrics, such as small business activity, the self-employment rate or the number of startups. We argue that those metrics...

The overwhelming majority of self-employed individuals are not entrepreneurial in the Schumpeterian sense. To unmistakably identify Schumpeterian entrepreneurs, we focus on self-made billionaires (in USD) from the Forbes Magazine list who became wealthy by founding new firms. In this way, we...

We study the effect of taxation on entrepreneurship, investigating how taxes affect both the number of start-ups and their average quality. We show theoretically that even with risk neutral agents and no tax evasion progressive taxes can increase entrepreneurial entry, while reducing average...

This paper uses data from Forbes Magazine’s list of billionaires, supplemented with other publicly available information, to study the migratory behavior of the very rich. Billionaires are more likely to move to countries that share a language and a culture with their country of birth and to...

Self-employment is often used as synonymous with entrepreneurship. We define entrepreneurship as having the ambition to grow or innovate. As part of a large and representative survey in Sweden, business owners were asked to self-identify as either entrepreneurs or self-employed. The survey in...

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