This volume provides a lens to analyze public policy decisions involving entrepreneurship.

This unique volume presents policy recommendations designed to promote entrepreneurship. It considers timely issues like impact of securities regulation, educational policy and intellectual property protection on entrepreneurship. In the process, the book addresses policies operating at the individual, national, regional, and international levels, and offers a unique perspective on several institutional structures that enhance entrepreneurship and economic growth.

The effects of entrepreneurship on a nationaleconomy are assumed to be widespread, influencing new products, prices,innovation, and productivity. Thus, a nation's policies toward the promotionof, or inhibition of, entrepreneurship are significant. This book is acompilation of papers from an April 2001 Syracuse University conference ofeconomists and addresses how public policy should promote entrepreneurship bylooking at the following main categories: Policies to Encourage EntrepreneurialActivity, Entrepreneurs in Unexpected Places, and Entrepreneurship andInequality. (AKP) Table of Contents When Bureaucrats Meet Entrepreneurs: The Design of Effective “Public VentureCapital” Programs, Josh Lerner The Self-Employed are Less Likely to have Health Insurance than WageEarners. So What? Craig William Perry and Harvey S. Rosen Business Formation and the Deregulation of the Banking Industry, SandraE. Black and Philip E. Strahan Public Policy and Innovation in the U.S. Pharmaceutical Industry, FrankR. Lichtenberg Dimensions of Nonprofit Entrepreneurship: An Exploratory Essay, Joseph J.Cordes, C. Eugene Steuerle, and Eric Twombly Does Business Ownership Provide a Source of Upward Mobility for Blacks andHispanics? Robert W. Fairlie Entrepreneurial Activity and Wealth Inequality: A Historical Perspective,Carolyn M. Moehling and Richard H. Steckel.

Experts in public economics and financial economics discuss the special role of venture capital and if public policy should promote the venture capital industry; empirical and theoretical perspectives are developed. The existing literature in both public economics and financial economics often fails to consider how appropriate and effective public policy may be in promoting the venture capital industry. Public economics has dealt extensively with the effect of taxes and subsidies but has neglected the unique role of venture capitalists as active investors who provide not only funding but added value. Financial economics has emphasized the special role of the venture capitalist but has not focused on the real effects of venture capital in industry equilibrium or the role of public policy. This volume in the CESifo Seminar series brings together experts in public and financial economics to develop a theoretically and empirically informed international policy perspective for an era in which policymakers increasingly look to venture capital as a source of jobs, innovation, and economic growth. The chapters in part I analyze data on the levels of venture capital fundraising in Europe, problems in the bank-oriented beginnings of German venture capital finance in the 1970s, and the inefficiency of Canadian labor-sponsored venture capital funds. Part II looks at the effect of venture capital on labor market performance, the importance of exit opportunities, and the effect of information inflows on the venture capital cycle. The chapters in part III take the perspective of public economics, reviewing the role of public policy in addressing potential market failures, improving the quality of venture capital investments, and affecting entrepreneurial business activity through tax policy.

By serving as a conduit for knowledge spillovers, entrepreneurship is the missing link between investments in new knowledge and economic growth. The knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship provides not just an explanation of why entrepreneurship has become more prevalent as the factor of knowledge has emerged as a crucial source for comparative advantage, but also why entrepreneurship plays a vital role in generating economic growth. Entrepreneurship is an important mechanism permeating the knowledge filter to facilitate the spill over of knowledge and ultimately generate economic growth.

A calculation of the social returns to innovation /Benjamin F. Jones and Lawrence H. Summers --Innovation and human capital policy /John Van Reenen --Immigration policy levers for US innovation and start-ups /Sari Pekkala Kerr and William R. Kerr --Scientific grant funding /Pierre Azoulay and Danielle Li --Tax policy for innovation /Bronwyn H. Hall --Taxation and innovation: what do we know? /Ufuk Akcigit and Stefanie Stantcheva --Government incentives for entrepreneurship /Josh Lerner.

"Innovation and entrepreneurship are ubiquitous today, both as fields of study and as starting points for conversations among experts in government and economic development. But while these areas on continue to attract public and private investments, many measurements of their resulting economic growth-including productivity growth and business dynamism-have remained modest. Why this difference? Because not all business sectors are the same, and the transformative gains of some industries have been offset by stagnation or contraction in others. Accordingly, a nuanced understanding of the economy requires a nuanced understanding of where innovation and entrepreneurship occur and where they matter. Answering these questions allows for strategic public investment and the infrastructure for economic growth.The Role of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Economic Growth, the latest entry in the NBER conference series, seeks to codify these answers. The editors leverage industry studies to identify specific examples of productivity improvements enabled by innovation and entrepreneurship, including those from new production technologies, increased competition, new organizational forms, and other means. Taken together, the volume illuminates whether the contribution of innovation and entrepreneurship to economic growth is likely to be concentrated, be it selected sectors or more broadly"--