Authors: Kostantinos Dellis, Sotiris Karkalakos, Kostantina Kottaridi

Title: Technological Growth, Entrepreneurship and Unemployment:Estimating the Openness Premium

Abstract

Technological growth, entrepreneurship, and unemployment influence each other in numerous ways, forming a trio of inter-related components, yet the literature has traditionally emphasized the endogenous determination of one or two components of this trio. In this study we intend to elaborate on the interrelationship between entrepreneurship, unemployment and economic growth in a dynamic context using vector auto-regressions (VAR) with panel data across 30 OECD countries for a period covering 1970 to 2011. We use data from the Compendia dataset for international entrepreneurship to estimate three equations: one each for entrepreneurship, growth, and unemployment. On the right-hand side (RHS) of each are lags of entrepreneurship, unemployment, and growth in our benchmark model, which we later enrich by including control variables according to the relevant literature. Each equation is estimated with Difference GMM and System GMM estimators.