Across countries, women own significantly fewer businesses than do men. We show that this is due, in large part, to the fact that the propensity to start businesses of women is significantly lower than that of men. The lower propensity of women, in turn, appears to be highly correlated to...

Using a dataset on career paths of elite U.S. engineers, including superstar entrepreneurs, we examine the effect of early career choices on long-run entrepreneurial outcomes. Exploiting exogenous variation in entry labor market conditions, driven by local financial sector growth, and comparing...

This article highlights the normative bias in the entrepreneurial theories of Schumpeter and Kirzner. This bias, while significant, has remained largely implicit, and the approaches of both authors, we argue, entail "Panglossian" views of entrepreneurial processes. We trace these problems to...