Year: 2013
Type: report
Abstract: The overwhelming majority of self-employed individuals are not entrepreneurial in the Schumpeterian sense. In order to unmistakably identify Schumpeterian entrepreneurs we focus on self-made billionaires (in USD) on Forbes Magazines list who became wealthy by founding new firms. In this way we identify 996 billionaire entrepreneurs in over fifty countries in the 19962010 period. To our knowledge this is the first systematic cross-country study of billionaire entrepreneurs, an economically important group. We demonstrate that the common practice of relying on self-employment and related measures to proxy for entrepreneurship often gives rise to misleading inferences. Interestingly the rate of billionaire entrepreneurs per capita correlates negatively with self-employment rates. Countries with higher income, higher trust, lower taxes, more venture capital investment and lower regulatory burdens have higher entrepreneurship rates but less self-employment.
Source: Econstor (Econstor)
Authors: Magnus Henrekson, Tino Sanandaji
Language: English
Subfield: Management of Technology and Innovation
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: European Commission
OpenAlex ID: W2167027240