Research on entrepreneurship has received an increased amount of interest in recent years, with self-employment being used as the most common proxy for “entrepreneurship” in empirical studies. However, there are various ways of defining self-employment, making it a somewhat dubious proxy....

Empirical studies demonstrate that most net job-growth originates from a small number of high-growth firms (HGFs). The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether family ownership matters for being an HGF, using data on all private firms in Sweden during 1993–2006. Our study is possible due to...

The Swedish government gathers information that helps identify family-owned businesses. This enabled the authors to analyze every business in the economy over a longer period than has heretofore been reported. Using this data, the authors found that family-owned businesses account for up to one...

Self-employment is the most frequently used measure of entrepreneurship. However, its definition varies between countries, which makes comparisons difficult. We present an analysis of Swedish self-employment data and show that even within one country, the depicted development differs greatly...

We analyze the effects of effective corporate tax rates on the size distribution of firms. In modelling this relationship we account for conditional variables as well as unobservable time and industry effects. A number of hypotheses are tested concerning heterogeneity in the impact of effective...

We study employment and new hires among high-growth firms (HGFs) in the Swedish knowledge-intensive sectors 1999–2002. Using matched employer–employee data, we find that HGFs are more likely to employ young people, poorly educated workers, immigrants, and individuals who experienced longer...