Net productive entrepreneurship: state and MSA-level indices, 2002—2019

This article extends Sobel’s entrepreneurship indices, which have over 1100 citations for testing Baumol’s theory that institutions incentivize entrepreneurial behaviour as either productive or unproductive. Leveraging new datasets, we create annual measures of productive, unproductive, and net productive entrepreneurship for states and metropolitan statistical areas (MSA) from 2002–2019. We document dramatic temporal changes within MSAs, substantial within-state variation across different metro areas, and declining net productive entrepreneurship over time, primarily in populous MSAs. The indices correlate with income, employment, and inequality, and are a valuable resource for exploring empirical questions about entrepreneurship across time and space.