Essays on institutions and pre-founding experience : effects for technology-based entrepreneurs in the US and China

This dissertation is composed of three essays. I look at the role of two different but critical factors in shaping entrepreneurial outcomes: individual level career history and the institutional context. My work spans two outcomes in particular: individual decisions to choose high-tech entrepreneurial activities and the strategies and outcomes of the entrepreneurial firms that are established. Following an introductory chapter that overviews the entire dissertation, Chapter Two discusses the use of alumni surveys as a methodology. The first of my three empirical essays is Chapter Three, entitled "Cutting Your Teeth: Building on the Micro-Foundations for Dynamic Capabilities with Edward Roberts, and investigates whether prior founding experience improves subsequent start-up firm performance. We draw on two strands of psychological theory - availability and partition dependence - and tie them together with the idea that variation in managers' cognitive representations of the competitive landscape drives differences in firm outcomes. The results of the study are consistent with an account where improved cognitive representations form dynamic capabilities and competitive advantage but appear less consistent with passive inheritance of search routines as a source of dynamic capabilities. We examine performance produced by variation in career experience driving differences in psychological biases. The second essay, "Who has 'The Right Stuff'? Human Capital, Entrepreneurship and Institutional Change in China", examines a model distinguishing barriers to entry from barriers to growth.