entrepreneurship

The paper provides a critical overview of recent empirical research on the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic growth.

The paper argues that cost of capital comparisons across closely held companies and entrepreneurial ventures on the one hand and widely held companies on the other, ought not to be based on an equal level assumption regarding the investors’ required rates of return, net of taxes.

The paper models firms entrepreneurial ability according to their ability to predict changes in productivity (i.e., their prediction ability), and derives an aggregate production function as a result of entrepreneurship. It is shown that prediction ability can aggravate distortions in the presence of political risk.

Examined in this paper is the choice between private and public incorporation of an asset for an entrepreneur (asset owner) who hires a manager and with superior information about the assets return distribution. The paper also explores the impact of incorporation mode--private versus public--and information structure on the firms investment policy and ownership distribution.

Analyzing textbooks for the presence of terms that fall naturally into two sets, the author investigates whether entrepreneurship-rich and institutions-rich theories are represented in Ph.D. programs in economics.

Using a micro data set generated from 19 waves of the German Socioeconomic Panel, the authors investigate self-employment dynamics. Findings suggest that the conditional probabilities of entry into self-employment are more than twice as high from the status of unemployment as from the status
of employment.

Highlighting successful youth entrepreneurship programs, the Kauffman Foundation report profiles six such programs in Chicago, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nashville, South Carolina and West Virginia. The report was conducted for the Appalachian Regional Commission.

The report is an annual assessment of the national level of entrepreneurial activity. Findings indicate that more than 11.3 percent of adults in the United States were engaged in entrepreneurial activity in 2003, representing an increase from 10.5 percent recorded in 2002. The report also found that more than 80 percent of entrepreneurs throughout the 41 countries studied expected to create new jobs as soon as their firms were more established, signaling widespread optimism.

The paper argues that the emerging interest in entrepreneurial development strategies is the start of something new, but does not yet reflect a coherent and comprehensive alternative model for state and local economic development policies.

According to the author, to move beyond aspiration and rhetoric involves the development of coherent and sustained policies to achieve the desired objectives. She stresses that the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor has a really important role to play and fills the information vacuum in a systematic and reliable manner.