The DOI matches its Crossref record; 20 of the 20 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Small business activity does not measure entrepreneurship
Open accessAbstract
Significance: Schumpeterian entrepreneurship refers to growing and innovative firms. However, in empirical research the rate of entrepreneurship is commonly estimated using the self-employment rate or other measures of small business activity. We argue that this empirical strategy gives rise to misleading inferences regarding Schumpeterian entrepreneurship. To unambiguously identify this type of entrepreneur we focus on self-made billionaires on Forbes Magazine’s list who became wealthy by founding new firms. We identify 996 such billionaire entrepreneurs in over 50 countries. The rate of billionaire entrepreneurs correlates negatively with self-employment, small business ownership, and startup 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.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Are family firms more tax aggressive than non-family firms?
Chen, S., Chen, X., Cheng, Q., & Shevlin, T. (2010) · Journal of Financial Economics · doi:10.1016/j.jfineco.2009.02.003 · Cited by 2,050
Does Entrepreneurship Pay? An Empirical Analysis of the Returns to Self‐Employment
Hamilton, B. H. (2000) · Journal of Political Economy · doi:10.1086/262131 · Cited by 1,845
What are we talking about when we talk about entrepreneurship?
Gartner, W. B. (1990) · Journal of Business Venturing · doi:10.1016/0883-9026(90)90023-m · Cited by 1,348
On the Life Cycle Dynamics of Venture‐Capital‐ and Non‐Venture‐Capital‐Financed Firms
PURI, M., & ZARUTSKIE, R. (2012) · The Journal of Finance · doi:10.1111/j.1540-6261.2012.01786.x · Cited by 670
What Happens When Wal-Mart Comes to Town: An Empirical Analysis of the Discount Retailing Industry
(2008) · Econometrica · doi:10.3982/ecta6649 · Cited by 655
Lerner, J. (2009) · Princeton University Press eBooks · doi:10.1515/9781400831630 · Cited by 628
(2008) · Choice Reviews Online · doi:10.5860/choice.46-2184 · Cited by 591
Hurst, E., & Pugsley, B. W. (2011) · Brookings Papers on Economic Activity · doi:10.1353/eca.2011.0017 · Cited by 405
Job Creation or Destruction? Labor Market Effects of Wal-Mart Expansion
Basker, E. (2005) · Review of Economics and Statistics · doi:10.1162/0034653053327568 · Cited by 338
Entrepreneurship: a weak link in the welfare state?
Henrekson, M. (2005) · Industrial and Corporate Change · doi:10.1093/icc/dth060 · Cited by 264
Self-citation
Cited by
Entrepreneurial Ecosystems and Regional Policy: A Sympathetic Critique
Stam, E. (2015) · European Planning Studies · doi:10.1080/09654313.2015.1061484 · Cited by 2,406
The lineages of the entrepreneurial ecosystem approach
Acs, Z. J., Stam, E., Audretsch, D. B., & O’Connor, A. (2017) · Small Business Economics · doi:10.1007/s11187-017-9864-8 · Cited by 1,020
Entrepreneurship, institutional economics, and economic growth: an ecosystem perspective
Acs, Z. J., Estrin, S., Mickiewicz, T., & Szerb, L. (2018) · Small Business Economics · doi:10.1007/s11187-018-0013-9 · Cited by 582
Entrepreneurship and the Business Cycle
Koellinger, P. D., & Roy Thurik, A. (2012) · Review of Economics and Statistics · doi:10.1162/rest_a_00224 · Cited by 477
A Realist Perspective of Entrepreneurship: Opportunities As Propensities
Ramoglou, S., & Tsang, E. W. K. (2016) · Academy of Management Review · doi:10.5465/amr.2014.0281 · Cited by 428
Metadata
- Authors
- Henrekson, M., & Sanandaji, T.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2014-01-21
- Volume
- 111
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 1760-1765
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- OpenAlex
- W2006761113
- Cited by
- 297
- References
- 20
- FWCI
- 62.25
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Small business activity does not measure entrepreneurship. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1073/pnas.1307204111
- The paper
- Henrekson, M., & Sanandaji, T. (2014). Small business activity does not measure entrepreneurship. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1307204111
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
