In this note a short introduction to the project "Employment Effects of Entrepreneurs" is presented. First, we describe the purpose of the project; second, we present the background; third, we briefly describe the three papers that constitute the output of the project, and fourth, we discuss two important qualifications for the understanding of the contributions and results established in the project.

What are the characteristics of jobs in entrepreneurial firms as compared to jobs in incumbent firms? Even though this question has been addressed by many researchers before us, we provide new evidence to the field since we measure the entrepreneur as the organic new firm. In the literature, the majority of studies have focused on entrepreneurs as measured by small or new firms. By organic new firms, we mean new firms that are not the result of restructurings or organizing existing or additional activities in a formally new firm. Moreover, we distinguish entrepreneurial firms by different types and distinguish between growing and declining industry-region clusters. Our results differ from the findings in the existing literature. Specifically, we find that compared to incumbents, entrepreneurial firms have higher total factor productivity, are more skill intensive, and pay higher wages. The differences are more pronounced in growing clusters. Moreover, the results show important differences between different types of entrepreneurial firms. Specifically, spin-offs are found to enjoy the largest productivity advantage. The wage and skill premiums at the firm level disappear at the job level, as larger incumbents are both more skill intensive and pay higher wages than smaller incumbents.

We study whether entrepreneurial spinoffs are important drivers of industry dynamics. More precisely, we investigate whether the quality of jobs in spinoff entrepreneurs are higher than for other entrepreneurs. We distinguish spinoff firms by different types and distinguish between growing and declining industry-region clusters. We find that spinoffs on average have higher wages, are more skill intensive, have higher sales per worker and are more productive than non-spinoff entrepreneurial firms. The differences are more pronounced in growing clusters. The results even hold when we control for worker heterogeneity and industry and region clusters characteristics. An important feature of the analysis is that we measure the entrepreneur as the organic new firm. By organic new firm, we mean new firms that are not the result of restructurings or organising existing or additional activities in a formally new firm.

We extend earlier analyses of the job creation of start-ups vs. established firms by taking into consideration the educational content of the jobs created and destroyed. We define education-specific measures of job creation and job destruction at the firm level, and we use these to construct a measure of "surplus job creation" defined as jobs created on top of any simultaneous destruction of similar jobs in incumbent firms in the same region and industry. Using Danish employer-employee data from 2002-7, which identify the start-ups and which cover almost the entire private sector, these measures allow us to provide a more nuanced assessment of the role of entrepreneurial firms in the job-creation process than previous studies. Our findings show that while start-ups are responsible for the entire overall net job creation, incumbents account for more than a third of net job creation within high-skilled jobs. Moreover, start-ups "only" create around half of the surplus jobs, and even less of the high-skilled surplus jobs. Finally, our approach allows us to characterize and identify differences across industries, educational groups and regions.