Presenter: Manasa Gopal (Georgia Tech) Coauthors: Sudheer Chava (Georgia Tech), Manpreet Singh (Georgia Tech), and Yafei Zhang (Georgia Tech) Discussant: Erik Mayer (SMU)
Category Archives: Seminar
Daniel Gross (Duke University)
“America, Jump-started: World War II R&D and the Takeoff of the U.S. Innovation System” Presenter: Daniel P. Gross (Duke) Coauthors: Bhaven N. Sampat (Columbia) Discussant: Bitsy Perlman (Census)
Viola Salvestrini (Queen Mary University of London)
Title: “Early exposure to entrepreneurship and the creation of female entrepreneurs” Using registry data from Denmark, we track the educational and professional choices of one million individuals from adolescence to adulthood and investigate the effects of early exposure to entrepreneurs on the gender gap and the allocation of talent in entrepreneurship. We exploit within-school, across-cohort …
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Julia Fonseca (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
Title: “How Much Do Small Businesses Rely on Personal Credit?” This paper estimates the degree of substitution between personal and small business credit for U.S. entrepreneurs between 2009 and 2018 using a novel, individual-level dataset. We identify the effect of business credit supply shocks by exploiting geographic variation in the market share of large banks, …
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Abhishek Nagaraj (University of California, Berkeley)
Title: “The Streetlight Effect in Data-Driven Exploration” We consider settings such as innovation-oriented R&D and entrepreneurship where agents must explore across different projects with varying but uncertain payoffs. How does providing partial data on project payoffs affect individual performance and social welfare? While data can typically reduce uncertainty and improve welfare, we present a simple …
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Ana Babus (Washington University in St. Louis)
Title: “The Anatomy of Financial Innovation” The number of varieties of financial products that firms can use to raise funds from investors has rapidly expanded over the past decades. And yet, many firms issue only a few standard products, such as common stocks and bonds. This paper studies innovation in financial products using a combination …
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Sean Higgins (Northwestern University)
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 …
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 …