This paper reconsiders the predominant typology pioneered by Baumol (1990) between productive, unproductive and destructive entrepreneurship. Baumol’s classificatory scheme is built around a limited concept of first-best outcomes and therefore easily fails to appreciate the true impact of...

This paper studies the evolution of the modern Swedish inheritance taxation from its introduction in 1885 to its abolishment in 2004. A thorough description is offered of the basic principles of the tax, including underlying ideas and ambitions, tax schedules, and rules concerning valuation of...

This paper studies the evolution of modern Swedish wealth taxation since its introduction in 1911 until it was abolished in 2007. It offers a thorough description of the rules concerning valuation of assets, deductions/exemptions and tax schedules to characterize effective wealth tax schedules...

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...

This paper examines policy measures that foster the creation of innovations with high inherent potential and that simultaneously provide the right incentives for individuals to create and expand firms that disseminate such innovations in the form of highly valued products. In so doing, we...

We review and assess the role local institutional framework conditions play in fostering local entrepreneurship. The basic premise is that entrepreneurship is a central driver of economic renewal and change, and that institutions affect both the supply and direction of entrepreneurship. While...

This essay uses Edmund Phelps new book Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs,Challenge, and Change (Princeton University Press, 2013) as inspiration to discuss innovation and entrepreneurship. The book is laudable for its discussion of what constitutes a “good life”....

This paper studies the evolution of Swedish inheritance taxation since the late nineteenth century to its abolition in 2004. Our contribution is twofold. First, we compute the annual effective inheritance tax rates for different sizes of bequests, if the inherited assets were family firm equity...

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...

The Swedish economy has developed rapidly since the mid-1990s relative to most comparable countries, in particular relative to almost all other EU-15 countries. We investigate two policy areas that are believed to have been important for the strong economic development in Sweden during the last...