In his new paper, The Entrepreneurial Spirit and What the Law Can Do about It, Amir Licht covers a lot of ground in pursuit of a "small theory of entrepreneurial motivations." That small theory depends in important part on the psychological profile of entrepreneurs, which he derives from a survey of recent scholarship:

Research on the individual psychology of the entrepreneur after two decades is beginning to yield a clear portrait, the features of which are well-anchored in rigorous analysis. Entrepreneurs are indeed special individuals in that they tend to exhibit a particular combination of psychological attributes compatible with their role in the economy as new venture creators.

This is an aggressive paper, galloping from economics to psychology to sociology to law and back around again. Amir eventually addresses a normative question: can legal reform encourage entrepreneurship? He emerges a skeptic, concluding that there is "disappointingly little room for effective intervention targeted at fostering entrepreneurship."

He may be right. And as a person who is largely ambivalent on these sorts of normative questions, I would not be disappointed if he were right. But Amir is fairly audacious in his efforts to build the foundation for his conclusion, and, by his own admission, the theoretical and empirical support for strong conclusions is missing.

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