Relying on Forbes Magazine annual rankings for two decades, 1625 billionaires and their countries of birth and residence are identified, most of whom are self-made entrepreneurs. 13 percent of billionaires reside in a country other than that of their birth. Migration is linked to distance, to...

Entrepreneurship policy mainly aims to promote innovative Schumpeterian entrepreneurship. However, the rate of entrepreneurship is commonly proxied using quantity-based metrics, such as small business activity, the self-employment rate, or the number of startups. We argue that those metrics give...

We study the effect of taxation on entrepreneurship, taking into account both the amount of entry and the quality of new ventures. We show that even with risk neutral agents and no tax evasion progressive taxes can increase entrepreneurial entry, while reducing average firm quality. So called...

We examine whether Europe has an “entrepreneurship deficit” compared to other industrialized regions. Cross-country comparisons are difficult due to the lack of standard empirical definitions of entrepreneurship. Measures focusing on small business activity and startup rates suggest that...

Venture capital has become a dominant form of innovation finance, used by many high-tech startups. Europe lags the U.S. in both VC activity and the creation of successful startups, and has recently been surpassed by China. Few European countries have rates of VC activity commensurable to their...

In some classes of models, taxes at the owner level are “neutral” and have no effect on firm activity. However, this tax neutrality is sensitive to assumptions and no longer holds in more complex models. We review recent research that incorporates greater complexity in studying the link...

Are quantitative measures driven by small business activity also valid proxies for high-impact Schumpeterian entrepreneurship? We compile four hand-collected measures of high-impact Schumpeterian entrepreneurship (VC-funded IPOs, self-made billionaire entrepreneurs, unicorn start-ups, and young...

A review of the literature on firm taxation reveals that the economics of entrepreneurship has only recently and gradually been taken into consideration, and not yet sufficiently so. We discuss how this affects conclusions derived from standard models of capital taxation when applied to...

This paper discusses the problem of empirically measuring past trust. Today, the share of the population who generally trusts others ranges from 60-70 percent in Scandinavian countries to as low as 3-4 percent in countries like Colombia and the Philippines. The reasons why certain countries have...