Has the Swedish Business Sector Become More Entrepreneurial than the US Business Sector?

Lars Persson, Fredrik Heyman and Norbäck, Pehr-Johan
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Pehr-Johan Norbäck

No 13683, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Recent studies document a 30-year decline in various measures of entrepreneurship in the U.S. Using detailed Swedish employer-employee data over the period 1990 to 2013, we find young firms to be more prominent in the Swedish business sector than in the U.S. business sector. Young Swedish firms, aged five years or less, account for more than half of all firms during this period. We also observe an increase in Swedish entrepreneurial activity for start-ups. However, increasing job destruction rates for young firms has implied a declining employment share for younger firms from the mid-2000s. Moreover, most of the job creation by young firms occurs in the expanding service sector. We discuss different explanations for why Sweden appears not to have the same strong decline in entrepreneurial activity as the U.S. has had during the last two decades. We argue that one important explanation is economic reforms in Sweden in the 1990s that mitigated several hurdles to entrepreneurship.

Keywords: entrepreneurship; Job dynamics; Matched employer-employee data; Industrial structure and structural change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J23 K23 L26 L51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-ent, nep-eur, nep-ind, nep-ino, nep-law, nep-lma, nep-sbm and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Has the Swedish business sector become more entrepreneurial than the US business sector? (2019)
Working Paper: Has the Swedish Business Sector Become More Entrepreneurial than the U.S. Business Sector? (2018)
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