This essay uses Edmund Phelps’ new book Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change (Phelps <CitationRef CitationID="CR67">2013</CitationRef>) as inspiration to discuss innovation and entrepreneurship. The book is laudable for its discussion of what constitutes a “good life”. Phelps argues that...</citationref>

This paper studies the evolution of the modern Swedish inheritance taxation from its introduction in 1885 to its abolishment in 2004. Our contribution is twofold. First, we compute annual effective inheritance tax rates for differently sized bequests and different types of inherited assets...

As economists and policymakers strive to understand the causes of the global financial crisis, pinpointing the relationship between government size and economic growth is crucial.

Last year, Challenge published a piece by sociologist Walter Korpi on the failure of conventional economics in Sweden. In recent years the conventional view has been critical of the Swedish welfare society. We now present a rebuttal to that piece by an economist who believes neoclassical...

What factors determine national differences in the size and industry distribution of employment? This study stresses the role of business taxation, employment security laws, credit market policies, wage-setting institutions and the size of the public sector. We characterize these aspects of the...

The paper reviews and evaluates some recent contributions on modeling entrepreneurship within a neoclassical framework, analyzing how, and to what extent, the fundamental ingredients suggested in the social science literature were captured. It is shown how these approaches are important in...

Taxation theory rarely takes entrepreneurship into consideration. We discuss how this omission affects conclusions derived from standard models of capital taxation when applied to entrepreneurial income. Some of the defining features of entrepreneurship often omitted by standard capital taxation...