The overwhelming majority of self-employed individuals are not entrepreneurial in the Schumpeterian sense. To unmistakably identify Schumpeterian entrepreneurs, we focus on self-made billionaires (in USD) from the Forbes Magazine list who became wealthy by founding new firms. In this way, we...

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...

We estimate the effect of college education on business survival using the NLSY79. The endogeneity of both education and business ownership is accounted for by a competing risks duration model augmented with a college selection equation. Contrary to the previous literature, we fi…nd no effect...

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...

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...

Thomas Piketty has argued that the rising income share of top earners in the US is driven by the growing incomes of “Supermanagers”, high-level managers and supervisors in large firms. Piketty has further argued that this development is best explained by growing managerial bargaining power...

Self-employment is often used as synonymous with entrepreneurship. We define entrepreneurship as having the ambition to grow or innovate. As part of a large and representative survey in Sweden, business owners were asked to self-identify as either entrepreneurs or self-employed. The survey in...