To Örebro University

The neo-Schumpeterian growth models, which appeared in the early 1990s, have ostensibly reintroduced the entrepreneur into mainstream growth theory. However, we show that by ignoring genuine uncertainty and by assuming that profits follow an objectively true and ex ante known probability distribution, the entrepreneur is made redundant. Thus, the theory fails to exhaustively explain innovation, the role of ownership competence, profits, the function of financial markets, wealth and income distribution, and, ultimately, economic growth. These shortcomings risk leading to erroneous or overly narrow policy conclusions by overestimating the importance of supporting R&D investments. Rather, the presence of genuine uncertainty forms a fundamental theoretical basis for the importance of new venture creation as a source of innovation-driven growth; entrepreneurs must establish and expand firms to capture the subjectively perceived profit opportunities. Therefore, tax policy is decisive for the commercialization and dissemination of innovations by providing incentives to uncertainty-bearing, not only for entrepreneurs, but also for intrapreneurs and financiers taking an active part in the governance and development of firms based on innovations characterized by genuine uncertainty. Furthermore, taxation can distort the evolutionary selection of innovations and firms, for instance, by taxing owners and firms differently.

Based on a review of 700+ peer-reviewed articles since 1990, identified using text mining methodology and supervised machine learning, we analyze how neo-Schumpeterian growth theorists relate to the entrepreneur-centered view of Schumpeter Mark I and the entrepreneurless framework of Schumpeter Mark II. The literature leans heavily toward Schumpeter Mark II; innovation returns are modeled as following an ex ante known probability distribution. By assuming that innovation outcomes are (probabilistically) deterministic, the entrepreneur becomes redundant. Abstracting from genuine uncertainty, implies that central issues regarding the economic function of the entrepreneur are overlooked such as the roles of proprietary resources, skills, and profits.

The institutional literature suggests that long-term tax incentives are crucial for entrepreneurs, but studies on this topic are hampered by problems related to how to define and measure entrepreneurial income. We resolve these problems by drawing on a theoretical definition of the entrepreneur as an owner, which enables us to identify entrepreneurship empirically by means of investments made by active owners of closely held corporations. Using detailed Swedish tax data, we analyze the tax incentives for such owner-entrepreneur investments from 1862 to 2018, thereby highlighting the evolution of a general institutional phenomenon through a long-run, in-depth, country-specific analysis. We calculate the annual marginal effective tax rate (METR) on capital income for investments, distinguishing between average- and top-income entrepreneurs, and between three sources of finance. We identify five tax regimes that indicate substantial differences in institutional quality over time according to the magnitude of the METR and METR differences between average- and top-income entrepreneurs and across sources of finance. Growth-conducive tax incentives shed light on why so many successful entrepreneurial firms were founded in Sweden around 1900, whereas increased taxation helps explain the absence of new large entrepreneurial firms in Sweden after World War II. Improved incentives can be associated with Sweden's recent entrepreneurial renaissance.

This article presents a conceptual framework for analyzing the role of information technology in the formation of high-impact entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurial decision-making is contextualized in the setting of competent teams, and where its role in economic growth is modelled as part of a minimum set of actors necessary for the generation of innovative output—so-called collaborative innovation blocs. By departing from a collective of actors, rather than the individual entrepreneur, transactions costs are shown to become central for understanding the antecedents and conditions for high-impact entrepreneurship as core strategic decisions are often based on asymmetric information and bounded rationality. Subsequently, this also implies a central role for information technology in facilitating the processes that precede high-impact entrepreneurship through its ability to bridge or reduce information asymmetries. Based on the presented framework, the development of information technology is hypothesized to particularly favor new entrepreneurs with growth ambitions, new firm entry, and high growth firms by accelerating the creation and allocation of knowledge.  

Family firms account for a substantial share of economic activity and deviate from standard economic assumptions on firmbehavior. However, little is known about how these firms are represented in economic theory. This article examines the inclusion of family business in the curricula of economics doctoral programs in the United States and Sweden as well as professors’ and textbook authors’ views and research on family business. Textbooks, articles and course offerings used in doctoral programs are considered to indicate the state of established knowledge in the field. The findings show that family business is not included in the examined curricula. Furthermore, professors and authors do not publish research on family business and generally do not see a need to incorporate it into economic theory. This article concludes that family business is excluded from ‘core’ economic theory due to a lack of paradigmatic pluralism, axiomatic incompatibility, path dependency, institutional bias and data constraints. Lastly, it is speculated that integration of family business theory into standard economic modeling is likely to occur outside prestigious universities due to path dependency in research.

Beginning in the interwar period, industrial foundations became a vehicle for the corporate control of large listed firms in Sweden, but in the 1990s they were replaced by wealthy individuals who either directly own controlling blocks or who own them through holding companies. We study potential explanations for this change and propose two taxation-related candidates: shifts in the relative effective taxation across owner types and the dismantling of the inheritance taxation that prevented the generational transfer of the ownership of large controlling blocks. Our analysis exploits newly computed marginal effective capital income tax rates across capital owners, accounting for all relevant factors, including rules governing tax exemptions. We show that the 1990–91 tax reform, abolition of the wealth tax for controlling owners in 1997, 2003 tax exemption of dividends and capital gains on listed stock for holding companies with a voting or equity share of at least 10 percent, and abolition of the inheritance and gift taxes in 2004 reversed the rules of the game. Recently, control has largely been wielded through direct ownership, and the role of foundations is rapidly declining. These findings point to the importance of tax incentives for the use of foundations as the control vehicles of listed firms.

It has been argued that the Swedish tax system has favored firm control through industrial foundations, which should have inhibited entrepreneurship and economic growth. However, research has been hampered due to a lack of systematic historical tax data. The purpose of this study is to describe the evolution of tax rules for industrial foundations in Sweden between 1862 and 2018 and to calculate the marginal effective tax rate on capital income (METR). The results show that the METR for an equity financed investment is below 20 percent most of the time and occasionally peak at about 40 percent. Treating the requirement that industrial foundations have to donate the bulk of capital income (less capital gains) to charitable purposes as a tax, the METR seldom is below 50 percent when financing investments with new share issues, and often exceeds 100 percent.

Beginning in the interwar period, industrial foundations became a vehicle for the corporate control of large listed firms in Sweden, but in the 1990s they were replaced by wealthy individuals who either directly own controlling blocks or who own them through holding companies. We study potential explanations for this change and propose two taxation-related candidates: shifts in the relative effective taxation across owner types and the dismantling of the inheritance taxation that prevented the generational transfer of the ownership of large controlling blocks. Our analysis exploits newly computed marginal effective capital income tax rates across capital owners, accounting for all relevant factors, including rules governing tax exemptions. We show that the 1990–91 tax reform, abolition of the wealth tax for controlling owners in 1997, 2003 tax exemption of dividends and capital gains on listed stock for holding companies with a voting or equity share of at least 10 percent, and abolition of the inheritance and gift taxes in 2004 reversed the rules of the game. Recently, control has largely been wielded through direct ownership, and the role of foundations is rapidly declining. These findings point to the importance of tax incentives for the use of foundations as the control vehicles of listed firms.

Although the refugee immigration crisis is one of the major socio-economic challenges in Europe, we still lack knowledge on what characterizes firms that provide jobs for unemployed immigrants. We provide an answer by investigating firms that recruit unemployed non-Western immigrants using matched employer-employee data from Statistics Sweden. We find large industry differences; firms active in the service sectors, such as the hospitality, transport, and healthcare industries, are much more likely to hire unemployed non-Western immigrants than firms in high-tech and manufacturing industries. In addition, after controlling for educational attainment and industry of occupation, firms with at least one non-Western immigrant manager hire more than four times as many unemployed non-Western immigrants than firms without any non-Western immigrant managers. Public policies that target industries might thus also influence job opportunities for immigrants and, thereby, the possibility of their integration into society. 

This paper addresses three simple questions: how should the contribution of HGFs to job creation be measured? how much does this contribution vary across countries? to what extent does the cross-country variation depend on variation in the proportion of HGFs in the business population? The first is a methodological question which we answer using a more highly articulated version of the standard job creation and destruction accounts. The other two are empirical questions which we answer using a purpose-built dataset assembled from national firm-level sources and covering nine countries, spanning the ten three year periods from 2000/03 to 2009/12. The basic principle governing the development of the accounting framework is the choice of appropriate comparators. Firstly, when measuring contributions to job creation, we should focus on just job creating firms, otherwise we are summing over contributions from firms with positive, zero, and negative job creation numbers. Secondly, because we know growth depends in part on size, the ’natural’ comparison for HGFs is with job creation by similar-sized firms which simply did not grow as fast as HGFs. However, we also show how the measurement framework can be further extended to include, for example, a consistent measure of the contribution of small job creating firms. On the empirical side, we find that the HGF share of job creation by large job creating firms varies across countries by a factor of two, from around one third to two thirds. A relatively small proportion of this cross-country variation is accounted for by variations in the influence of HGFs on job creation. On average HGFs generated between three or four times as many jobs as large non-HGF job creating firms, but this ratio is relatively similar across countries. The bulk of the cross-country variation in HGF contribution to job creation is accounted for by the relative abundance (or rarity) of HGFs. Moreover, we also show that the measurement of abundance depends upon the choice of measurement framework: the ’winner’ of a cross-national HGF ’beauty context’ on one measure will not necessarily be the winner on another.