We investigate which countries have the highest potential to achieve entrepreneurial progress. This progress is defined using an entrepreneurial ladder with five successive steps: “never thought about starting a business”, “thinking about starting a business”, “taking steps to start a...

In this report, we study the development of Finnish startup firms based on both survey and register data. The sample includes all firms that were founded in the first half of the year 2005, and those firms have been monitored for eight years. We find that entrepreneurs in growth-oriented...

In this study, we analyze the characteristics and development of Finnish startups based on firm-level data available in public databases. By startups we refer to young, small, and independent firms holding basic elements for growth. Some 4 000–5 000 of such firms are being established...

About half of all new business activity in Finland can be categorized as being entrepreneurial. The number of this kind of new businesses has not increased dramatically during the last ten years. However, the characteristics of these businesses have changed. Nowadays, new entrepreneurs have...

Public policy is currently shifting from SME policy towards entrepreneurship policy, which supports entrepreneurship without directing attention to quantitative goals and specific firms or employment groups. The institutional framework set by public policy affects the prevalence and performance...

One of the most salient and relevant dimensions of team heterogeneity is ethnicity. We measure the causal impact of ethnic diversity on the performance of business teams using a randomized field experiment. We follow 550 students who set up 45 real companies as part of their curriculum in an...

Improved governance and lower start-up costs may not be sufficient for encouraging the type of entrepreneurship that matters for economic growth. Using panel data on 60 countries spanning the period 2003-07 this paper establishes that (i) opportunitymotivated entrepreneurship (as opposed to...

We investigate the effects that regional start-up activity has on employment in new and in incumbent businesses. The analysis is performed for West German regions over the 1987-2002 period. It shows that the effects of new businesses on employment in the incumbents are significantly positive and...

Empirical analyses suggest that the employment creating effect of start-ups is highest in regions with a low level of new business formation and that an increase in the regional start-up rate beyond a certain level may lead to negative employment effect. In explaining these results, we assume...

Public policy is currently shifting from SME policy towards entrepreneurship policy, which supports entrepreneurship without directing attention to quantitative goals and specific firms or employment groups. The institutional framework set by public policy affects the prevalence and performance...