In Overcoming Barriers to Entrepreneurship, Diana Furchtgott-Roth compiles academic discussions of real and perceived barriers to the founding and running of small businesses in America. She and her colleagues illustrate how policy and economic environment can hinder business owners and suggest what can be done to help them.

Starting with venture capital access in Silicon Valley during the Internet bubble, Overcoming Barriers to Entrepreneurship goes on to question the link between personal wealth and entrepreneurship, to investigate how federal tax rates effect small-business creation and destruction, to explain the low rate of self-employment among Mexican immigrants, and to suggest how pension coverage can be increased in small businesses. Concluding with an attempt to qualify what makes an entrepreneur, the contributors argue that policymakers need not create incentives for entrepreneurs to create new businesses, though there is a great deal they can do to encourage entrepreneurs by removing legal and economic roadblocks to business creation.

Now that Congress is once again considering raising taxes and increasing regulation, the publication of this book could not come at a better time.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Employment Policy at the Hudson Institute.