How much credit can be given to entrepreneurship for the unprecedented innovation and growth of free-enterprise economies? In this book, some of the world's leading economists tackle this difficult and understudied question, and their responses shed new light on how free-market economies work--and what policies most encourage their growth.

The contributors take as their starting point William J. Baumol's 2002 book The Free-Market Innovation Machine (Princeton), which argued that independent entrepreneurs are far more important to growth than economists have traditionally...

While the public policy community has turned to entrepreneurship to maintain, restore, or generate economic prosperity, the economics profession has been remarkably taciturn in providing guidance for public policy for understanding the links between entrepreneurship and economic growth as well as for framing and weighing policy issues and decisions. The purpose of this volume is to provide a lens through which public policy decisions involving entrepreneurship can be guided and analyzed. In particular, this volume provides insights from leading research concerning the links between...