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This research note compares voter opinions regarding small business entrepreneurial activity to opinions of small business owners and links any divergence in perceptions to realized suboptimal entrepreneurial growth policy.

Primary data collection via best–worst scaling and estimation of linear regression models.

Results suggest that small business owners are less concerned about issues such as foreign competition, estate/death taxes, oil prices and labor union demands but are more concerned with domestic competition, income taxes, regulatory burdens and availability of credit from lenders.

The authors find major discrepancies in opinions about trade policy and business financing, which may lead to policy design that hinders entrepreneurship given evidence that politicians do respond to voters' opinions (Autor et al., 2016).

It represents the first empirical assessment of differences between voter and small business owner perspectives on entrepreneurial policy. An immediate policy implication includes the need to provide additional avenues of communication of entrepreneurs' concerns.

The purpose of this paper is to quantify to what extent the housing bubble in the early-to-mid 2000s in Spain exacerbated land planning corruption among Spain’s largest municipalities.

The authors exploit plausibly exogenous variation in housing prices induced by changes in local mortgage market conditions; namely, the rapid expansion of savings banks (Cajas de Ahorros). Accounting for electoral competition in the 2003–2007 and 2007–2009 electoral cycles among Spanish municipalities larger than 25,000 inhabitants, the authors estimate a positive relationship between housing prices and land planning corruption in municipalities with variation in savings bank establishments using instrumental variables techniques.

A 1% increase in housing prices leads to a 3.9% points increase in the probability of land planning corruption. Moreover, absolute majority governments (not needing other parties’ support) are more susceptible to the incidence of corruption than non-majority ones. Two policy implications to address corruption emerge: enhance electoral competition and increase scrutiny over land planning decisions in sparsely populated.

First empirical evidence of a formal link between the 2000s housing bubble in Spain and land planning corruption.