"Entrepreneurs out of necessity" identified by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor survey are a sizeable group across countries. They tend to have low education, run smaller firms, expect their firms to grow less, but are likely to stay in the market. This evidence is a challenge for existing...

Institutional settings and the resulting incentive structures are crucial for economic development. The type of entrepreneurial activity and the entrepreneurial effort are especially dependent on underlying incentive structures. We argue that institutions with better incentive structures for...

This paper studies the eff ects of foreign competition on self-employment levels. We begin by pointing out a previously unknown fact: the greater the exposure to foreign competition, the smaller the fraction of self-employed people. This fact holds across very different countries, across...