In this article, we examine the relationship between innovation and firm growth. Drawing on previous research, we implement a classification of innovations based on whether they are explorative or exploitative. Access to Swedish register data comprising the entire private sector from 1997 to 2012 allows us to construct innovation patterns for more than 480,000 firms. GMM-estimations confirm a significant and positive effect of both exploitative and explorative innovation on firms’ employment growth. More radical explorative innovations are shown to have a more persistent growth effect, while exploitative innovation increases labour demand in the short run.

We present a modified version of the entrepreneurial choice model, where it is shown that the expected utility of becoming an entrepreneur is decreasing in both the levels of taxes and the tax administrative burden. We extend previous empirical findings by examining how these variables influence entrepreneurs at different stages in the entrepreneurial life cycle. Our findings imply that the effect of the tax administrative burden varies over the entrepreneurial life cycle from strongly negative to insignificant. The most pronounced negative effects appear in the early stages of entrepreneurship. We conclude that a 10% reduction in the tax administrative burden increases the propensity for new business establishments by 4%. Our findings support the idea that tax simplification is one way to encourage entrepreneurship, without any reduction in tax revenues.

Utilising a unique Swedish matched employer-employee dataset, which has been pooled with firm-level patent application data, we provide new evidence that knowledge workers mobility has a positive and strongly significant impact on firm innovation output, as measured by firm patent applications. The effect is statistically and economically highly significant for knowledge workers who have previously worked in a patenting firm (the learning-by-hiring effect), whereas only limited impact could be detected for firms losing knowledge workers (the learning-by-diaspora effect). No effects were detected for inexperienced university graduates. Finally, the effect is more pronounced when the joining worker originates from within the same region.

The relationship between self-employment and subjective well-being (SWB) is contingent on the heterogeneity observed among entrepreneurs. We argue that independence and job control, two commonly suggested sources of entrepreneurs’ higher SWB, are likely to disproportionately benefit opportunity entrepreneurs who were pulled into their occupation choice. A review of the psychological literature on the determinants of well-being further supports the view that more dynamic and impactful entrepreneurship should lead to higher SWB. Analysis of Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data from 70 countries (N = 111,589) confirm this proposition. We show that entrepreneurs, all else equal, rate their life satisfaction substantially higher than employees and, further, that this effect is entirely driven by opportunity entrepreneurs.

The sorting of high-ability workers is often advanced as one source of spatial disparities in economic outcomes. There are still few papers that analyze when human capital sorting occurs and whom it involves. Using data on 16 cohorts of university graduates in Sweden, we demonstrate significant sorting to urban regions on high school grades and education levels of parents, i.e., two attributes typically associated with latent abilities that are valued in the labor market. A large part of this sorting has already occurred in deciding where to study, because the top universities in Sweden are predominantly located in urban regions. The largest part of directed sorting on ability indicators occurs in the decision of where to study. Even after controlling for sorting prior to labor market entry, the best and brightest are still more likely to start working in urban regions. However, this effect appears to be driven by Sweden's main metropolitan region, Stockholm. We find no influence of our ability indicators on the probability of starting to work in urban regions after graduation when Stockholm is excluded. Studies of human capital sorting need to account for selection processes to and from universities, because neglecting mobility prior to labor market entry is likely to lead to an underestimation of the extent of the sorting to urban regions.