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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 ...
Working Paper
Consumer Demand and Credit Supply as Barriers to Growth for Black-Owned Startups
We formulate a framework showing that differences in capital returns and capital intensity between groups of firms can identify relative differences in consumer demand and credit constraints. Using micro-data on Black- and White-owned startups, we find robust evidence that Black-owned startups have lower capital returns, implying that Black-owned startups face lower consumer demand due to race. In contrast, we find mixed evidence of tighter credit constraints due to race. We further show that differences in capital returns are persistent over time, whereas capital intensity differences are ...
Working Paper
How Did Young Firms Fare During the Great Recession? Evidence from the Kauffman Firm Survey
We examine the evolution of several key firm economic and financial variables in the years surrounding and during the Great Recession using the Kauffman Firm Survey, a large panel of young firms founded in 2004 and surveyed for eight consecutive years. We find that these young firms experienced slower growth in revenues, employment, and assets and faced tighter financing conditions during the recessionary years. While we find some evidence that firm growth picked up following the recession, it is not clear that it returned to the levels it would have been absent the recessionary shock. We ...
Working Paper
International trade, female labor, and entrepreneurship in MENA countries
Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries stand out in international comparisons of de jure obstacles to female employment and entrepreneurship. These obstacles are mirrored in low female labor rate participation and low entrepreneurship and ownership rates. Recent research suggests a connection between international trade and female labor participation. In this article, the authors focus on the relationship between international trade and gender in the MENA countries first analyzing female labor as a production factor, and then focusing on female entrepreneurship and firm ownership. ...
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
Entrepreneurship and State Taxation
Entrepreneurship plays a vital role in the economy, yet there exists little well-identified research into the effects of taxes on startup activity. Using recently developed county-level data on startups, we examine the effect of states' corporate, personal and sales tax rates on new firm activity and test for cross-border spillovers in response to these policies. We find that new firm employment is negatively?and disproportionately?affected by corporate tax rates. We find little evidence of an effect of personal and sales taxes on entrepreneurial outcomes. Our results are robust to changes in ...
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 ...
Journal Article
Are Tax Incentives the Answer to More Job Creation?
You can't discuss job creation without talking about entrepreneurship ? and that is a hot topic right now. Television shows such as Shark Tank and the film The Social Network have elevated the popularity of entrepreneurship in America. Alongside this media and entertainment interest is the explosive growth in college-level entrepreneurship education programs, which have increased from about 250 in 1985 to more than 5,000 in recent years.
Periodic Essay
Reflections: Small Businesses
An enviable aspect of the U.S. economy around the globe is our spirit of innovation, entrepreneurship, ease of business entry and exit, and labor market flexibility. These are key attributes of a dynamic economy, one that offers opportunities for people to live good and productive lives. Entrepreneurship – setting up and running one’s own business – has always been part of the narrative of the American dream, an avenue to creating and growing wealth, contributing to the community, and leaving a legacy for one’s family.
Working Paper
The Global Distribution of College Graduate Quality
We measure college graduate quality — the average human capital of a college’s graduates—using the average earnings of the college’s graduates adjusted to a common labor market. Our implementation uses the database of the website Glassdoor, which has the necessary information on earnings and education for non-migrants and migrants who graduate from roughly 3,300 colleges in 66 countries. Graduates of colleges in the richest countries have 50 percent more human capital than graduates of colleges in the poorest countries. Migration reinforces these differences. Poorer countries do not ...