Zoltan Acs

Zoltan Acs
Born Villach, Austria
Nationality United States and Hungarian
Institution London School of Economics, George Mason University
School or tradition
 Keynesian economics
Alma mater The New School for Social Research, New York, New York

Zoltan J. Acs (born 1947) is an American economist, author, writer, and scholar. He is Professor of Management at The London School of Economics (LSE),[1] and a professor at George Mason University, where he teaches in the School of Public, Governmental and International Relations (SPIGIA) and is the Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Public Policy.[2] He is also a visiting professor at Imperial College Business School in London[3] and affiliated with the University of Pecs in Hungary. He is co-editor and founder of Small Business Economics, a leading academic journal.

Dr. Acs was previously Research Scholar at the Entrepreneurship Growth and Public Policy Group at the Max Planck Institute for Economics in Jena, Germany. He has also served as Chief Economist at the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA); Research Fellow at the U.S. Bureau of the Census; Associate Director of the Center for International Business Education and Research; Research Associate at the Institute on Western Europe at Columbia University; and Scholar-in-Residence at the Kauffman Foundation.

A leading advocate of the importance of entrepreneurship for economic development, Acs is the founder and President of The GEDI Institute, a global think tank based in Washington, D.C.[4] Along with Dr. Laszlo Szerb, Acs is the creator of the Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index (GEDI) that is the first roadmap and compass to track the global entrepreneurship ecosystem.

He has published more than 200 articles and 35 books. His most recent book, Why Philanthropy Matters: How the Wealthy Give, and What it Means for our Economic Well-Being (2013), was a finalist for the Academy of Management George R Baker Prize for the best book in management in 2014.[5]

Personal life

Zoltan Acs was born in Villach, Austria, to Hungarian parents. He emigrated with his parents to the United States in the 1950s and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, He attended St. Michael High in Cleveland, graduating in 1968. His father worked and struggled to find his way in a drastically different world than that of Central Europe in the 1950s, and his mother raised her children at home.

Being an immigrant was one of the driving motivators that led Acs to study economics. His and his family's lives were disrupted by the advent of communism and socialism in their home country, which left the Acs family with little choice but to flee to America. Acs wanted to understand the economics behind these changes and how economics influences the workings of the world.

He attended his hometown university of Cleveland State for his Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics, which he earned cum laude in 1972. Between the end of his undergraduate career and beginning of his graduate studies, he met his future wife, Jane, and they moved to New York City where Acs completed his Ph.D in Economics in 1980. They were married in 1976 and have two children, Ashley and Annabel. Ashley recently earned his Ph.D in Politics from Princeton University, and Annabel is a pharmaceutical epidemiologist in New York City.

Acs's hobbies include cooking, skiing, biking across America, and driving fast cars.

Academic career

Acs earned bis Bachelor of Arts cum laude in Economics from Cleveland State University in 1972. He then studied Economics at the New School for Social Research in New York, earning his Masters of Arts in 1974 and Doctor of Philosophy in 1980. His dissertation on the American steel industry was highly influential in the economics research world. He discovered that the steel industry consisted not only of big businesses, but also of many small firms, which was contrary to popular belief at the time. Acs recognized that the United States was experiencing a reemergence of small firms and entrepreneurship. This discovery has led to a multitude of research by other scholars in the economics field.

Positions Held

Acs has had a long and distinguished career in the world of academia. After earning his PhD in Economics in 1980, he became an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at Middlebury College, Vermont.[6] In 1982 he was a Research Associate with the Institute on Western Europe at Columbia University, New York.[7] From 1985-1988 he was an associate professor in the Department of Economics and a research associate at the Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development Center with the University of Illinois at Springfield.[8]

For the next five years, Acs moved to Germany and was a Research Fellow at Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fur Sozialforschung, in the Market Processes and Corporate Development Research Unit.[9] He then moved back to the United States and was Associate Director of the Center for International Business Education and Research, as well as a visiting professor of Business and Public Policy at the College of Business and Management of the University of Maryland.[10]

Acs worked in the United States public sector in addition to the academic world. From 1996-1998, he was the Chief Economic Advisor of the Office of Economic Research at the U.S. Small Business Administration in Washington, D.C.[11] Following that position, until 2001, Acs was the Census Research Fellow in the Center for Economic Studies at the U.S. Bureau of the Census, in the U.S. Department of Commerce, also in Washington, D.C.

From 1989 until 2005, at the same time that he held the above positions, Acs was the Doris and Robert McCurdy Distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship as well as the Director of the Entrepreneurship Program (1998-2002), Professor of Economics (1991-2005), and Professor Emeritus (2005–present) at the Merrick School of Business at the University of Baltimore, Maryland. He was tenured in 1992. In 2002 he became a member of the external faculty of the English Language PhD Program at the University of Pecs, Hungary - a position he still holds. Also from 2002 to 2009, Acs was a research scholar at the Max Plank Institute of Economics in Jena, Germany. Here he worked with the Entrepreneurship, Growth, and Public Policy Group. From 2010 to 2011, he was the Chief Economist with the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration in Washington, D.C.[12]

Acs is currently on study leave from the George Mason University, where he is a tenured university professor and the Director for Entrepreneurship and Public Policy in the School of Public Policy.[13] During this study leave he is a Professor of Management and Professional Research Fellow at the London School of Economics, which is ranked the #1 university in London for 2015.[14] He is also currently a visiting professor with the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the Imperial College Business School, in London, United Kingdom, which after LSE is ranked the 4th best university in the UK.[15]

Research

Acs's primary contributions to his field have been in the areas of Innovation, Regional Knowledge Spillover, Incentives and Entrepreneurship, and Entrepreneurship and Technology.

Innovation

Prior to Acs's work, innovation emphasized large firms based on research inputs at the firm level. However, in the late 20th century small firms became important to innovation and were 2.5 times as innovative as large firms on a per employee basis.[16] While large firms were still important for carrying out research, small firms were frequently the ones that carried out the innovation, especially in new knowledge intensive industries. Both unions and monopolies hurt innovation.[17] This research fed into a growing literature on trying to understand firm dynamics, technical change, economic growth, productivity, and regional development.[18]

Knowledge Spillovers in Cities

The question of how small firms innovated when they did not have the finance or the knowledge led to the study of the geography of innovation with a focus on knowledge spillovers. However, instead of focusing on knowledge spillovers within industries, Acs studied knowledge spillovers within cities. Here both industry and university research became important for the first time. The discovery that knowledge spillovers are local led to a whole new research area in cities.[19] Knowledge was concentrated in cities travelng only 100 miles. Acs's work opened up a new way of looking at innovation, entrepreneurship, and cities.[20]

New Entrepreneurship Theory

Entrepreneurship theory has resided with Frank Hyneman Knight, Israel Kirzner, and Joseph Schumpeter for many years. None of these theories or their modern versions, however, effectively tied entrepreneurship into the role of cities, knowledge, and innovation. The Knowledge Spillover Theory of Entrepreneurship (KPTE) invented by Acs and his colleagues provided a unified theory that explained both why entrepreneurship was important and how entrepreneurs took advantage of knowledge spillovers. The KTSE provided an explanation of why new firms were needed, how they fit into cities, and how they contributed to economic growth. The theory was expanded to include factors such as efficiency, competition, growth theory, and studies of productivity.[21]

Incentives and Entrepreneurship

While entrepreneurs are interested in creating wealth and scaling projects, they are not usually interested in societal welfare. This leads to productive, unproductive, and destructive entrepreneurship. While unproductive entrepreneurship is important in all economies, destructive entrepreneurship is relevant in most developing economies. Acs's work on incentives led to a better understanding of how institutions create incentives and lead to productive or destructive entrepreneurship.[22] The Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index (GEDI) created a new tool to measure productive entrepreneurship across countries and over time.

Entrepreneurship and Philanthropy

Acs developed a theory that explains that wealth needs to be redistributed in order to dismantle previously created wealth and provide opportunities for future generations to become entrepreneurs. The four currents of opportunity, entrepreneurship, wealth, and philanthropy give us a theory of human nature that has been around for millions of years and has been instrumental in the evolution of the human species.[23]

Education

Honors

Awards

Teaching

Dr. Acs has served as the thesis and dissertation advisor to a multitude of graduate students since the 1980s, from universities such as Carnegie Mellon, the University of Illinois at Springfield, University of Colorado at Boulder, West Virginia University, Rutgers University, George Mason University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago:

Global Entrepreneurship Development Institute

Zoltan Acs is the founder and President of the Global Entrepreneurship Development Institute, otherwise known as the GEDI Institute.[43] The GEDI Institute is a research organization that advances knowledge on links between entrepreneurship, economic development and prosperity.[44] It is a Washington, D.C.-based policy development organization dedicated to expanding economic opportunities for individuals, communities, and nations. The institute was founded by world-leading entrepreneurship scholars from the London School of Economics, George Mason University, University of Pécs and Imperial College London.[45]

The main contribution of The GEDI Institute is the GEI index, a breakthrough advance in measuring the quality and dynamics of entrepreneurship ecosystems at a national, regional and local level.[46] The GEI index methodology, has been validated in rigorous academic peer reviews and has been widely reported in media, including in The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Forbes.

The methodology has also been endorsed by the European Commission and has been used to inform the allocation of EU Structural and Cohesion Funds.[47] The theoretical approach of The GEDI Institute has also influenced entrepreneurship policy thinking in trans-national organisations such as United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

Global Entrepreneurship Index

The GEDI methodology collects data on the entrepreneurial attitudes, abilities and aspirations of the local population and then weights these against the prevailing social and economic ‘infrastructure’ – this includes aspects such as broadband connectivity and the transport links to external markets. This process creates 14 ‘pillars’ which GEDI uses to measure the health of the regional ecosystem.

This mix of attitudes, resources, and infrastructure is known as the entrepreneurship ‘ecosystem’. The Global Entrepreneurship Index is an annual index that measures the health of the entrepreneurship ecosystems in each of 120 countries. It then ranks the performance of these against each other. This provides a picture of how each country performs in both the domestic and international context.

Female Entrepreneurship Index

GEDI’s women’s entrepreneurship index, the Female Entrepreneurship Index (FEI), measures the development of high potential female entrepreneurship worldwide. Defined as "innovative, market expanding, and export oriented," this gender specific Index utilizes GEDI’s unique framework, methodology, and global approach in order to capture the multi-dimensional aspects of entrepreneurial development.

Like the Global Entrepreneurship Index, the FEI framework pairs together individual-level and institutional-level variables into pillars. These contain three main sub-indices that measure the quality of: 1) the entrepreneurial environment; 2) the entrepreneurial eco-system; and 3) women’s entrepreneurial aspirations. GEDI’s proprietary methodology captures the dynamic, inter-related nature of the pillars. Data is sourced from internationally recognized datasets including the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, the International Labor Organization, the World Economic Forum, the World Bank, UNESCO, and United Nations Development Program. Data collected for individual-level variables are disaggregated by gender. For institutional variables, data points highlight issues relevant to the development and growth of female entrepreneurship.

Regional GEDI

A part of the Europe 2020 agenda, the Regional GEDI is a comprehensive innovation strategy to strengthen Europe’s capacity for delivering smart, sustainable and inclusive growth.

The strategy encourages the design of regional innovation strategies for smart specialization with special attention to entrepreneurial activities as a key driver of economic recovery and employment growth. The Regional Entrepreneurship and Development Index (REDI) creates the most appropriate composite indicator of regional entrepreneurship covering the 27 member states of the EU and Croatia at the NUTS-2 level.

The results provide empirical evidence of the quantity and quality of entrepreneurship in Europe with the aim of mapping entrepreneurship at the regional level. The project provides the contextual analysis the European Commission needs to inform the design of Cohesion policy for the next 2014-2-2 programming period. The results will support the assessment of regional innovation smart specialization strategies in Europe, in particular, for new policy targeting business needs and improving business environment within specific European regional environments.

Publications

Books

Selected articles

References

  1. ↑ "Professor Zoltan Acs". London School of Economics Department of Management. London School of Economics.
  2. ↑ "Center for Entrepreneurship and Public Policy". George Mason University. George Mason University.
  3. ↑ "Visiting Professors and Researchers". Imperial College Business School. Imperial College Business School of London.
  4. ↑ "The GEDI Institute". Global Entrepreneurship and Development Institute. Global Entrepreneurship and Development Institute.
  5. ↑ "Why Philanthropy Matters: How the Wealthy Give, and What It Means for Our Economic Well-Being". Princeton University Press. Princeton University.
  6. ↑ "Zoltan Acs Curriculum Vitae". George Mason University. George Mason University.
  7. ↑ "Zoltan Acs Curriculum Vitae". George Mason University. George Mason University.
  8. ↑ "Zoltan Acs Curriculum Vitae". George Mason University. George Mason University.
  9. ↑ "Zoltan Acs Curriculum Vitae". George Mason University. George Mason University.
  10. ↑ "Zoltan Acs Curriculum Vitae". George Mason University. George Mason University.
  11. ↑ "Zoltan Acs Curriculum Vitae". George Mason University. George Mason University.
  12. ↑ "Zoltan Acs Curriculum Vitae". George Mason University. George Mason University.
  13. ↑ "Center for Entrepreneurship and Public Policy". George Mason University. George Mason University.
  14. ↑ "University League Table 2016". The Complete University Guide. The Complete University Guide.
  15. ↑ "University League Table 2016". The Complete University Guide. The Complete University Guide.
  16. ↑ Acs, Zoltan (September 1988). "Innovation in Large and Small Firms: An Empirical Analysis". American Economic Review 78: 678–690.
  17. ↑ Acs, Zoltan (1990). Innovation and Small Firms. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
  18. ↑ Acs, Zoltan (September 1988). "Innovation in Large and Small Firms: An Empirical Analysis". American Economic Review 78: 678–690.
  19. ↑ Acs, Zoltan (1997). "Local Geographic Spillovers Between University Research and High Technology Innovations". Journal of Urban Economics 42: 422–448.
  20. ↑ Acs, Zoltan (1992). "Real Effects of Academic Research: Comment". American Economic Review: 363–367.
  21. ↑ Acs, Zoltan J. (2013). "The Social Value of Productive Entrepreneurship". Small Business Economics Journal 3: 785–796.
  22. ↑ Desai, Sameeshka (2013). "A Theory of Destructive Entrepreneurship: Insights on Conflict, Post-conflict Recovery". Journal of Conflict Resolution 57 (1): 20–40. doi:10.1177/0022002712464853.
  23. ↑ "Why Philanthropy Matters". Google Books. Google.
  24. ↑ "Members of HAS". Members of Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
  25. ↑ "Zoltan Acs". World Entrepreneurship Forum. World Entrepreneurship Forum.
  26. ↑ "UP Prominents & Honorary Doctors". University of Pécs. University of Pécs.
  27. ↑ "2015 Wilford White Fellow Inductees". International Council for Small Business. International Council for Small Business.
  28. ↑ "Three Luminaries Award". International Council of Small Business. International Council of Small Business.
  29. ↑ "Why Philanthropy Matters: How the Wealthy Give, and What It Means for Our Economic Well-Being". Princeton University Press. Princeton University.
  30. ↑ "Maryann P. Feldman, Brief Bio". University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
  31. ↑ "Graduate Program of Public Administration at Yonsei University". Yonsei University Graduate School. Yonsei University.
  32. ↑ "Faculty for the Marist School of Management". Marist College. Marist College.
  33. ↑ "Ivey Faculty Directory". Ivey Business School. Ivey Business School.
  34. ↑ "Ting Zhang Biography". College of Public Affairs. University of Baltimore.
  35. ↑ "Sameeksha Desai Biography". Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affiars. Indiana University.
  36. ↑ "Soogwan Doh's Biography". Soogwan Doh. Soogwan Doh.
  37. ↑ "Faculty and Staff". School of Urban & Regional Planning. University of Iowa.
  38. ↑ "Hezekiah Agwara". National Bureau of Economic Research. National Bureau of Economic Research.
  39. ↑ "Anamaria Berea, Researcher". Department of Computational Social Science. Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, George Mason University.
  40. ↑ "Affiliated Doctoral Students". Center for Science and Technology Policy. George Mason University School of Public Policy.
  41. ↑ "Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs". John F. Kennedy School of Government. Harvard University.
  42. ↑ "David J. Miller, Director of Entrepreneurship". Center for Social Entrepreneurship. George Mason University.
  43. ↑ "The Team". The GEDI Institute. The GEDI Institute.
  44. ↑ "The Institute". The GEDI Institute. The GEDI Institute.
  45. ↑ "The Team". The GEDI Institute. The GEDI Institute.
  46. ↑ "The Institute". The GEDI Institute. The GEDI Institute.
  47. ↑ "The Institute". The GEDI Institute. The GEDI Institute.
  48. ↑ "The GEDI Institute". The GEDI Institute.
  49. ↑ "Why Philanthropy Matters". Google Books. Google.
  50. ↑ Acs, Zoltan. "Identifying the Obstacles to High Impact Entrepreneurship in Latin America and the Caribbean". George Mason University.
  51. ↑ "The GEDI Institute". The GEDI Institute.
  52. ↑ "The GEDI Institute". The GEDI Institute.
  53. ↑ "The GEDI Institute". Google Play. Google.
  54. ↑ "Handbook of Entrepreneurship Research: An Interdisciplinary Survey and Introduction". SpringerLink!. SpringerLink.
  55. ↑ "Handbook of Entrepreneurship Research: An Interdisciplinary Survey and Introduction". SpringerLink!. SpringerLink.
  56. ↑ Acs, Zoltan. "Entrepreneurship, Growth, and Public Policy". Academic. Cambridge University Press.
  57. ↑ Acs, Zoltan. "Obesity, Business, and Public Policy". Edward Elgar Publishing. Edward Elgar Publishing.
  58. ↑ Acs, Zoltan. "Entrepreneurship, Growth and Public Policy, with David B. Audretsch and Robert Strom". Academic. Cambridge University Press.
  59. ↑ Acs, Zoltan. "Public Policy in an Entrepreneurial Economy". Springer Link. Springer Link.
  60. ↑ Acs, Zoltan. "Public Policy in an Entrepreneurial Economy". Springer Link. Springer Link.
  61. ↑ Acs, Zoltan. "Obesity, Business, and Public Policy". Edward Elgar Publishing. Edward Elgar Publishing.
  62. ↑ Acs, Zoltan. "Entrepreneurship, Geography, and American Economic Growth". Academic. Cambridge University Press.
  63. ↑ Acs, Zoltan and David Audretsch. "Handbook of Entrepreneurship Research". SpringerLink. SpringerLink.
  64. ↑ Acs, Zoltan and David Audretsch. "Handbook of Entrepreneurship Research". SpringerLink. SpringerLink.

External links

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