Abstract
We study the relationship between corporate tax rates and the growth-aspiring share of entrepreneurship across countries and show that this effect is not universally strongly negative as often argued in extant literature. Our argument is supported by an analysis of 382 country‒year observations for 78 countries from the GEM and World Economic Forum (WEF) databases. These findings highlight how corporate taxation’s impact on entrepreneurs’ growth aspirations is contingent on national economic and institutional contexts. Importantly, these findings contribute to the nascent interest in the relationship between entrepreneurship and inequality, implying that increased corporate taxes may have important public benefits without the downsides so feared by many entrepreneurship scholars and policymakers.