Many regional development policy initiatives assume that entrepreneurial activities promote economic growth. Empirical research has presented rationale for this argument showing that small firms create proportionally more new jobs than large ones. However, little research has been performed on...

Human capital obtained through education has been shown to be one of the strongest drivers of entrepreneurship performance. The entrepreneur’s human capital, though, is only one of the input factors into the production process of her venture. In this paper we will analyze to what extent the...

This paper estimates an unobserved components model to explore the macro dynamics of entrepreneurship in Spain and the US. We ask whether entrepreneurship exhibits hysteresis, defined as a macro dynamic structure in which business cycle fluctuations have persistent effects on the natural rate of...

Some three to four decades ago, it was generally accepted in economic literature that the average size of firms would continue to increase with progressive economic development. This would be the result of an ever increasing importance of exploitation of scale economies. However, since that...

The relationship between self-employment and some macroeconomic variables is and has been at the heart of the debate about self-employment contributions to employment and economic growth. This paper is devoted to the exploration of the co-movement and causality between entrepreneurship and...

We explore the macro structure of entrepreneurship rates in a panel of 23 OECD countries over 1972-2006. We find that rates of entrepreneurship in OECD’s countries exhibit persistence rather than hysteresis. Implications for the design of entrepreneurship policies are discussed

The aim of this article is to evaluate the promotion of self-employment as an employment strategy at the macroeconomic level, taking into account the potential existence of asymmetric effects of such policies across nations. In particular, we examine whether the employment intensity of...