WEFI
Title: “Diversity and Performance in Entrepreneurial Teams” We study the role of diversity and performance in the entrepreneurial teams. We exploit a unique dataset of MBA students who participated in a required course to propose and start a real microbusiness that allows us to examine horizontal diversity (i.e., within the team) as well as vertical …
Continue reading “Sophie Calder-Wang (The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania)”
Title: “Propagation and Amplification of Local Productivity Spillovers” This paper shows that local productivity spillovers propagate throughout the economy through the plant-level networks of multi-region firms. Using confidential Census plant-level data, we show that large manufacturing plant openings not only raise the productivity of local plants but also of distant plants hundreds of miles away, …
Title: “Opening up Military Innovation” How should governments procure innovation? One choice facing policymakers is whether to tightly specify the innovations they seek (a “Conventional” approach) or to allow firms to suggest ideas (an “Open” approach). We study a natural experiment in the U.S. Air Force Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program where Open and …
Title: “Open Sourcing and Startup Funding: Evidence from GitHub” We study the participation of nascent firms in open source communities and its implications forattracting funding. To do so, we exploit rich data on 160,065 US startups linking information fromCrunchbase to firms’ GitHub accounts. Estimating a within-startup model saturated with fixedeffects, we show that startups accelerate …
Title: “Entrepreneurial Migration” We use cross-state business registrations to track the geographic movement of startups with high growth potential. In their first five years, 6.6% percent of these startups move across state borders. Though startup births are concentrated geographically, hubs like Silicon Valley and Boston on net lose startups to entrepreneurial migration. A revealed preference …
Title: “Startup Experience, Venture Capital Experience, and First-time Venture Fund Performance” We study the sources of cross-sectional variation in the performance of first-time venture capital (VC) fund partners. We find that, relative to partners with startup experience, partners with VC experience are at least 20 percent more likely to invest in successful deals or start …
Title: “Did Western CEO Incentives Contribute to China’s Technological Rise?” We study the role of Western CEO incentives in fostering the technological rise of China. Due to China’s quid pro quo policy, foreign multinationals face a trade-off between the short-term benefits of accessing China’s vast market and the long-term costs of transferring technology to China. …
Title: “Rugged Entrepreneurs: The Geographic and Cultural Contours of New Business Formation” How do geographic and historical-cultural factors shape new business formation? Using novel data on new business registrations, we document that 75% of the variation in new business formation is explained by time-invariant county-level factors and examine the extent to which such variation is …
Continue reading “John M. Barrios (Washington University in St. Louis)”
Title: “Surviving the FinTech Disruption” This paper studies how demand for labor reacts to financial technology (fintech) shocks based on comprehensive databases of fintech patents and firm job postings in the U.S. during the past decade. We first develop a measure of fintech exposure at the occupation level by intersecting the textual information in job …
Title: “Learning from Errors in Entrepreneurship” This paper studies how entrepreneurs form new beliefs after making forecast errors. I use survey-based micro data that are representative of the population of French entrepreneurs, and I find that 21% of entrepreneurs make optimistic errors, while 36% make pessimistic errors, suggesting that a minority of entrepreneurs are initially …