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Report
Wealth, tastes, and entrepreneurial choice
The nonpecuniary benefits of managing a small business are a first order consideration for many nascent entrepreneurs, yet the preference for business ownership is mostly ignored in models of entrepreneurship and occupational choice. In this paper, we study a population with varying entrepreneurial tastes and wealth in a simple general equilibrium model of occupational choice. This choice yields several important results: (1) entrepreneurship can be thought of as a normal good, generating wealth effects independent of any financing constraints; (2) nonpecuniary entrepreneurs select into ...
Discussion Paper
Mind the Gap: How Do Credit Market Experiences and Borrowing Patterns Differ for Minority-Owned Firms?
Given the relationship between a small business’s access to financing and its outcomes, and given the growing share of minorities in the U.S. population, it is important that creditworthy firms and entrepreneurs, irrespective of race or ethnicity, are able to secure adequate financial resources to achieve growth and success. This paper employs data from the Federal Reserve System’s 2016 Small Business Credit Survey to explore under what conditions credit market experiences differ for various racial and ethnic ownership groups of small employer firms.The authors find evidence for ...
Working Paper
Getting Schooled: The Role of Universities in Attracting Immigrant Entrepreneurs
We study immigrant founders of venture-capital backed firms using a new and detailed data set that we assemble on the backgrounds of founders. Immigrant founders have been critical to the entrepreneurial ecosystem, accounting for roughly 20% of all venture capital-backed founders over the past 30 years. We document the channels through which immigrant founders arrive in the United States and how those channels have changed over time. Higher education has served as the primary entry channel for immigrant founders. The share of foreign-educated immigrant founders who initially arrive for work ...
Working Paper
The Local Origins of Business Formation
What locations generate more business ideas, and where are ideas more likely to turn into businesses? Using comprehensive administrative data on business applications, we analyze the spatial disparity in the creation of business ideas and the formation of new employer startups from these ideas. Startups per capita exhibit enormous variation across granular units of geography. We decompose this variation into variation in ideas per capita and in their rate of transition to startups, and we find that both components matter. Observable local demographic, economic, financial, and business ...
Working Paper
The Role of Startups for Local Labor Markets
We investigate the dynamic response of local U.S. labor markets to increased job creation by new firms and compare the effects to overall labor demand shocks. To account for both dynamic and spatial dependence we develop a spatial panel VAR that builds on recent advances in the VAR literature to identify structural shocks using external instruments. We find that startup shocks have a small but persistent effect on local employment through population growth. Population growth, in turn, is largely driven by immigration. We also investigate how the responses differ by local characteristics such ...
Trade liberalization reduces entrepreneurship rate
Our research suggests that if the world becomes increasingly interconnected through international trade, entrepreneurship rates will decrease over time.
Working Paper
Financial Constraints of Entrepreneurs and the Self-Employed
Growth-oriented entrepreneurial start-ups generate more economic growth than other self-employed businesses, yet they only constitute a small fraction of start-ups. We examine whether financial constraints impede these types of start-ups by exploiting lottery wins as exogenous wealth shocks. We find that lottery-win magnitude increases winners? subsequent incorporation, implying that entrepreneurs face financial constraints, but not business registration, implying that financial constraints do not bind as much for the self-employed. Our results, that financial constraints bind for ...
Working Paper
Entrepreneurship through Employee Mobility, Innovation, and Growth
Firm-level productivity differences are big and largely ascribed to ex-ante heterogeneity in the entrepreneurs’ growth potential at birth. Where do these ex-ante differences come from, and what can the policy do to encourage the entry of high-growth entrepreneurs? I study empirically and by means of a quantitative growth model the spinout firms: the firms founded by former employees of the incumbent firms. By focusing on innovating spinouts identified through the inventor mobility in the patent data, I document that spinout entrants significantly outperform regular entrants throughout their ...
Newsletter
How Does the Gig Economy Support Entrepreneurship?
Entrepreneurs take risks to develop new products and start new businesses. In the early phases of starting a business, when an entrepreneur’s income is sometimes lacking or unstable, the gig economy offers opportunities to supplement and smooth income. This Page One Economics® essay discusses this relationship, including some interesting research on the topic.
Report
Grown-up business cycles
We document two striking facts about U.S. firm dynamics and interpret their significance for employment dynamics. The first is the dramatic decline in firm entry and the second is the gradual shift of employment toward older firms since 1980. We show that despite these trends, the lifecycle dynamics of firms and their business cycle properties have remained virtually unchanged. Consequently, aging is the delayed effect of accumulating startup deficits. Together, the decline in the employment contribution of startups and the shift of employment toward more mature firms contributed to the ...