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

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 thought, and that an implicit partnership between such entrepreneurs and large corporations is critical to the success of market economies. The contributors include the editors and Robert M. Solow, Kenneth J. Arrow, Michael M. Weinstein, Douglass C. North, Barry R. Weingast, Ying Lowrey, Nathan Rosenberg, Melissa A. Schilling, Corey Phelps, Sylvia Nasar, Boyan Jovanovic, Peter L. Rousseau, Edward N. Wolff, Deepak Somaya, David J. Teece, Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Kenneth L. Sokoloff, Yochanan Shachmurove, Ralph E. Gomory, Jonathan Eaton, Samuel S. Kortum, Alan S. Blinder, Robert J. Shiller, Burton G. Malkiel, and Edmund S. Phelps.

"This book brings together an absolutely first-rate group of thinkers, including several Nobel Prize winners, who were invited to a 2003 conference spurred by the publication of William J. Baumol's The Free-Market Innovation Machine. These thought-provoking essays illustrate the potential of Baumol's framework to considerably advance our understanding of what drives entrepreneurship, innovation, and long-term economic growth."-Scott Stern, Northwestern University