Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/81402 
Year of Publication: 
2013
Series/Report no.: 
IFN Working Paper No. 959
Publisher: 
Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN), Stockholm
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 Magazine’s list who became wealthy by founding new firms. In this way we identify 996 billionaire entrepreneurs in over fifty countries in the 1996–2010 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.
Subjects: 
Entrepreneurship
Innovation
Institutions
Regulation
Self-employment
JEL: 
L50
M13
O31
P14
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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