A 2012 ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEARMany of the United States' most innovative entrepreneurs have been immigrants, from Andrew Carnegie, Alexander Graham Bell, and Charles Pfizer to Sergey Brin, Vinod Khosla, and Elon Musk. Nearly half of Fortune 500 companies and one-quarter of all new small...

Unlike prior studies of the impact of health insurance on entrepreneurship, this paper uses primary data from a representative recent survey of entrepreneurs. First, we report the characteristics and socio-economic backgrounds of entrepreneurs. Second, we document that the lack of health...

The period of unprecedented expansion of immigrant-led entrepreneurship that characterized the 1980s and 1990s has come to a close. Today, the growth rate of immigrant-founded companies nationwide, at 24.3 percent, has plateaued. In the high-tech hub of Silicon Valley, the proportion of...