Billionaire entrepreneurs : a systematic analysis

Abstract: The overwhelming majority of self-employed individuals are not entrepreneurial in the Schumpeterian sense. In order to unmistakably identify Schumpeterian entrepreneurs we focus on self-made billionaires (in USD) on Forbes Magazine's list who became wealthy by founding new firms. In this way we identify 996 billionaire entrepreneurs in over fifty countries in the 1996-2010 period. To our knowledge this is the first systematic cross-country study of billionaire entrepreneurs, an economically important group. We demonstrate that the common practice of relying on self-employment and related measures to proxy for entrepreneurship often gives rise to misleading inferences. Interestingly the rate of billionaire entrepreneurs per capita correlates negatively with self-employment rates. Countries with higher income, higher trust, lower taxes, more venture capital investment and lower regulatory burdens have higher entrepreneurship rates but less self-employment. -- Entrepreneurship ; Innovation ; Institutions ; Regulation ; Self-employment