WEFI
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 …
Continue reading “Viola Salvestrini (Queen Mary University of London)”
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, …
Continue reading “Julia Fonseca (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)”
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 …
Continue reading “Abhishek Nagaraj (University of California, Berkeley)”
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 …
Continue reading “Ana Babus (Washington University in St. Louis)”
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 …