Edmund Phelps, the 2006 Nobel Laureate in Economics, has written a thought-provoking and ambitious book: Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change (Princeton University Press, 2013). The book is laudable for its emphasis on innovation, for its discussion of...

The Industrial Institute for Economic and Social Research (IUI) was founded in 1939. In less than ten years, IUI grew from a small survey bureau to a leading research institute focused on microeconomic research relevant to industrial development. Based on a number of new commemorative essays and...

By the late 1960s, real effective taxation of income from individual firm owner-ship in Sweden approached 100 percent. A series of tax reforms initiated in the late 1970s reversed this situation. This paper has a threefold purpose: (1) to elucidate the thinking behind the vision of creating a...

Mission-oriented innovation policies are becoming increasingly popular among policymakers and scholars. We maintain that these policies are based on an overly mechanistic view of innovation and economic growth, suggesting that a more bottom-up approach is called for. By invoking an...

We provide a critical analysis of the adoption of the US "top-five model" by European economics academia. This model prioritizes publications in five elite journals, heavily influencing the career trajectories of doctoral students and researchers. It highlights the inefficiencies and social...

The neo-Schumpeterian growth models, which appeared in the early 1990s, have ostensibly reintroduced the entrepreneur into mainstream growth theory. However, we show that by ignoring genuine uncertainty and by assuming that profits follow an objectively true and ex ante known probability...

Previous research, notably Baumol (1990), has highlighted the role of insti-tutions in channeling entrepreneurial supply into productive, unproductive or destructive activities. However, entrepreneurship is not only influenced by institutions—entrepreneurs often help shape institutions...