Ralph de Haas, Vincent Sterk and Neeltje van Horen

Anaemic productivity growth and limited business dynamism remain key policy concerns in Europe and the US. Policies to improve macroeconomic performance often target existing firms. Examples include tax measures to stimulate firm-level Research & Development and structural reforms to eliminate distortions in labour, financial, and product markets. In a new paper we investigate an entirely different policy lever, one that has so far remained largely unexplored: influencing the types of firms that are being started in the first place. Using a comprehensive new data set on European start-ups, we show how tax policies that shift the composition of new start-up cohorts could deliver meaningful macroeconomic gains.

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