Beer and Entrepreneurship...?

"We wanted to celebrate entrepreneurship — and good beer!" That's Rep. Betsy Markey, cited by Tim Haab at Environmental Economics. The broader context is (Politico):

House Resolution 1297, sponsored by Rep. Betsy Markey, supports "the goals and ideals of American Craft Beer Week."

"We've got quite a number of microbreweries and entrepreneurs that are creating jobs, and we wanted to celebrate that this is a craft," Markey told POLITICO.

"I think beer has been a tradition since this country was founded," said Markey.

Is it possible that the term "entrepreneurship" is used too frequently and with too loose an interpretation?

High Growth Firms

There is some great research on the important role of gazelles and young firms in driving growth and job creation. An interesting new study takes another look at some of these results. The abstract:

Prior studies have defined high-growth firms (HGFs) in terms of sales or employment, and analyzed their contribution to employment growth. We define HGFs by employment and sales and add definitions of value added and productivity. We examine the contribution of HGFs to employment growth, economic growth, productivity growth, and sales growth. All HGFs give a disproportionately large positive contribution to economic growth and most also give large positive contributions to growth in employment, productivity and sales. Although HGFs of different definitions are usually not the same firms, young firms are more likely to be HGFs irrespective of definition.

The paper is by Sven-Olov Daunfeldt,Niklas Elerta, and Dan Johansson, and is focused on Sweden. The results seem comparable across countries however.

"The economic contribution of high-growth firms: Do definitions matter?" (PDF)

The Degree Gap

Mark Perry has a great post about the number of female versus male collegiate graduates. One sentence (carpe diem): "For associate's, bachelor's and master's degrees, women will receive 1.823 million college degrees, which will be 571,000 more degrees than men will earn (1.252 million) this year."

The post is fascinating, and it has a link to the underlying data. Do check it out.

Esther Duflo on Randomized Trials

At Ted, Esther Duflo gives an overview of how randomized control trials can help answer questions in public health and education (via Alex Tabarrok).