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 from 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, since the mid-2000s, job destruction rates for young firms have been increasing, which implies a declining employment share for younger firms. 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 the economic reforms that were implemented in Sweden in the 1990s that mitigated several hurdles to entrepreneurship.

In industries with network effects, incumbents' installed bases create barriers to entry that discourage entrepreneurs from developing new innovations. Yet, entry is not the only commercialization route for entrepreneurs. We show that the option of selling to an incumbent increases the innovation incentives for entrepreneurs when the network effects are strong and incumbents compete to preemptively acquire innovations. Thus, we establish that network effects and installed bases do not necessarily restrict the innovation incentives, and that network effects promote acquisitions over entry.

This paper examines whether and, if so, why source country heterogeneity exists in foreign direct investment. Using detailed Swedish matched employer‐employee data for the period from 1996 to 2009, we find statistical evidence that affiliate performance differs systematically across source countries. We then show that differences in foreign multinational enterprises’ global management practices (estimated from the new firm‐level data from the World Management Survey) are an important determinant of productivity among foreign affiliates.

This paper examines employment and productivity dynamics in the Swedish business sector during the period 1996-2013. In order to analyze employment and productivity in a consistent way we apply a novel implementation of a method, which previously has been used extensively to analyze job dynamics, on both job and productivity dynamics. Our results, based on detailed matched employer-employee data for Sweden, indicate substantial heterogeneity in terms of job and productivity dynamics for different types of firms. We find that most of the net jobs were created in young, small firms, but at the same time we also find that most of the productivity gains were created in large old incumbent firms, thus suggesting a division of labor between the two. Our analysis provides new insights into the importance of age and size of firms in the restructuring process, stressing the dichotomy between employment growth and productivity growth in different types of firms.

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