Recent research has shown that entrepreneurs who start incorporated firms are fundamentally different from entrepreneurs who start sole proprietorships. This difference suggests that incorporation status may distinguish the self-employed with no ambition to hire from entrepreneurs who plan to...

Historically, the American armed forces were disproportionally drawn from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. A transition toward a smaller and more selective military has changed this tendency. Since the armed forces do not gather data on recruits’ family income, previous studies relied on...

A model of occupational choice and human capital investment is developed and tested. The model allows family background to influence occupational choice via access to economic resources, differences in costs of schooling, and ability uncertainty. The model predicts that people are more sensitive...

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...

In this introductory chapter to a collective volume,* we build on Baumol’s (1990) framework to categorize, catalog, and classify the budding research field that explores the interplay between institutions and entrepreneurship. Institutions channel entrepreneurial supply into productive or...

In this paper entrepreneurs are defined as agents who bring about economic change by combining their own effort with other factors of production in search of economic rents. The institutional setup is argued to determine both the supply and direction of entrepreneurial activity. Four key...