Abstract
The 2020 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research has been awarded to Professor John Haltiwanger. John Haltiwanger has made significant contributions to the field of entrepreneurship by improving our understanding of job creation and destruction, productivity growth, and the role of small- and medium-sized firms (SMEs) in economic development. He has played a major role in the careful development of large, longitudinal firm-level datasets, and introduced a novel and widely adopted measure of firm growth that addresses previous statistical biases. His work has influenced public policy and national statistical offices around the world.Plain English Summary The winner of the 2020 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research, John Haltiwanger, has pioneered research showing that it is mainly firm age, not size, that matters for job creation. Through analyzing the relationship between employment, growth, and firms, he has advanced our understanding of how the economy works. He has done this by building new datasets and introducing a new measure of firm growth, solving problems encountered with earlier techniques. His work has also broadened the policy debate on entrepreneurship and inspired people all around the world. From a policy perspective, John Haltiwanger has shown that it is difficult to justify targeted industrial and commercial policies, and if job creation is to be supported, politicians need to target young firms rather than small firms. These important findings from John Haltiwanger's pioneering work have been published in world-class leading academic and scientific journals.