In 1990, William Baumol published an article titled "Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive." In doing so he brought both the entrepreneur and the policy environment back into the discussion of why some countries are rich and others are poor. While the classical economists from Adam Smith onward had emphasized entrepreneurship and institutional quality, by 1990 the role of the 'rules of the game' in shaping the activities of entrepreneurs had receded into the background. As a result of Baumol's scholarship, institutional quality and entrepreneurship play a much larger role in our understanding of the process of economic growth and development. By one count, "Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive" has garnered over 4,000 citations since 1990.

This special issue honors and builds upon the work of William Baumol as exemplified in "Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive." The papers in this special issue were originally presented at a symposium that took place during the annual meeting of the Southern Economic Association in 2015. This symposium and special issue were organized by Dr. Alexandre Padilla of Metropolitan State College of Denver. The prominent scholars invited to present new research further exploring the themes of Baumol's seminal article did not disappoint.

The papers included in this special issue: