Partisan Entrepreneurship
82 Pages Posted: 7 Apr 2021 Last revised: 15 Jul 2023
There are 2 versions of this paper
Partisan Entrepreneurship
Partisan Entrepreneurship
Date Written: July 3, 2023
Abstract
Republicans start more firms than Democrats. In a sample of 40 million party-identified Americans between 2005 and 2017, we find that 5.5% of Republicans and 3.7% of Democrats become entrepreneurs. This partisan entrepreneurship gap is time-varying: Republicans increase their relative entrepreneurship during Republican administrations and decrease it during Democratic administrations, amounting to a partisan reallocation of 170,000 new firms over our 13-year sample. We find sharp changes in partisan entrepreneurship around the elections of President Obama and President Trump, and the strongest effects among the most politically active partisans: those that donate and vote.
Keywords: Entrepreneurship, Politics, Partisanship
JEL Classification: L26, G41, G51, M13
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation