Title: “Why Are Small Business Slow to Adopt Profitable Opportunities” Why do small firms often fail to adopt new profitable opportunities, even in the absence of informational frictions, fixed costs, or misaligned incentives? We explore three potential mechanisms: present bias, memory, and trust in other firms. In partnership with a financial technology (FinTech) company in …
Category Archives: Past
Laurent Frésard (Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano)
Title: “Knowledge Cycles and Corporate Investment” We examine how firms invest along their knowledge cycles. If investment is only a means to accumulate capital, cycles are irrelevant for the investment-value relation, with the two declining together over cycles. But we argue that investment also creates knowledge—serendipitously—disconnecting it from value. Investment is high early and late …
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Joan Farre-Mensa (University of Illinois Chicago)
Title: “Do Startup Patent Acquisitions Affect Inventor Productivity?” We show that the acquisition of a startup inventor’s first patent has a negative effect on the subsequent productivity of the patent’s inventor, leading to 6.7 fewer patents being granted to the inventor over the following five years. This effect is not due to the inventors of …
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Amir Sariri (Purdue University)
Title: “Does Mentorship Drive Startup Performance?” Mentorship is a staple component of private sector accelerators designed to maximize equity value and also of public sector initiatives created to support economic development. This paper examines whether, how, and when mentorship enhances startup performance. We show that mentorship drives startup performance. To address endogeneity concerns due to …
Sophie Calder-Wang (The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania)
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 …
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Simone Lenzu (New York University)
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, …
Sabrina T. Howell (New York University)
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 …
Maria P. Roche (Harvard Business School)
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 …
Jorge Guzman (Columbia University)
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 …
Emmanuel Yimfor (University of Michigan)
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 …