Immigrants account for about a quarter of US invention and entrepreneurship despite a policy environment that is not well suited for these purposes. This chapter reviews the US immigration policy environment that governs how skilled migrants move to America for employment-based purposes. We...

We explore co-ethnic hiring among new ventures using U.S. administrative data. Co-ethnic hiring is ubiquitous among immigrant groups, averaging about 22.5% and ranging from <2% to >40%. Co-ethnic hiring grows with the size of the local ethnic workforce, greater linguistic distance to English, lower...</2%>

Over the past half-century, while self-employment has consistently accounted for around one in ten of the United States workforce, its composition has changed. Since 1970, industries with high startup capital requirements have declined from 53% of self-employment to 23%. This same time period...

Leveraging data from eight U.S. states from the Startup Cartography Project, this paper provides new insight into the changing nature and geography of entrepreneurship in the wake of the COVID pandemic. Consistent with other data sources, following an initial decline, the overall level of...

This paper provides systematic empirical evidence for the distinctive role of universities on local entrepreneurial ecosystems. Assessing the impact of research institutions on entrepreneurship is challenging, given that these institutions are often located in economic and innovation...

High-skilled immigrants are a very important component of U.S. innovation and entrepreneurship. Immigrants account for roughly a quarter of U.S. workers in these fields, and they have a similar contribution in terms of output measures like patents or firm starts. This contribution has been...

While official measures of business dynamism have seen a long-term decline, early-stage venture financing of new companies has reached levels not observed since the late 1990s, resulting in a sharp debate about the state of American entrepreneurship. Building on Guzman and Stern (2015a; 2015b), this...

What is the role of startups within the innovation ecosystem? Since 2000, startups have grown in their share of commercializing research from top U.S. universities; however, prior work has little to say on the particular advantages of startup ventures in the innovation process relative to more...

This paper is motivated by the substantial differences in start-up commercialization strategies observed across different high-technology sectors. Specifically, we evaluate the conditions under which start-up innovators earn their returns on innovation through product market competition with...