We develop a theory of innovation for entry and sale into oligopoly, and show that inventions of higher quality are more likely to be sold (or licensed) to an incumbent due to strategic product market effects on the sales price. Such preemptive acquisitions by incumbents are shown to stimulate...

We examine immigrant entrepreneurship and the survival and growth of immigrant-founded businesses over time relative to native-founded companies. Our work quantifies immigrant contributions to new firm creation in a wide variety of fields and using multiple definitions. While significant...

Within the policy debate, there is a fear that large incumbent firms buy small firms' inventions to ensure that they are not used in the market. We show that such "acquisitions for sleep" can occur if and only if the quality of a process invention is small; otherwise, the entry profit will be...

Identifying high growth startups ex-ante and fostering their success is an important policy challenge. Using Swedish registry data, we show that previous labor market earnings of entrepreneurs is a simple observable that is strongly correlated with entrepreneurship success. Entrepreneurs from...

We study the relationship between ethnicity, occupational choice, and entrepreneurship. Immigrant groups in the United States cluster in specific business sectors. For example, the concentration of Korean self-employment in dry cleaners is 34 times greater than other immigrant groups, and...

We explore how financial constraints distort the entry decisions among otherwise productive entrepreneurs and limit growth of promising young firms. A model of liquidity-constrained entrepreneurs suggests that the easing of credit constraints can induce more entry of firms with greater long-run...

The creation and scaling of startups are inherently linked to risk-taking, with various types of owners handling these risks differently. This paper investigates the influence of an active venture capital (VC) market on startups’ decisions regarding research and scaling. It outlines conditions...

The COVID-19 pandemic delivered an unprecedented shock to business entry, with sharply contrasting effects on different types of startups. Using newly constructed administrative data from the Comprehensive Startup Panel covering the universe of U.S. startups, we provide the first official...

Emigration of young, motivated individuals may deprive countries-of-origin of entrepreneurs. We isolate exogenous variation in a large emigration wave from Italy between 2008 and 2015 by interacting diaspora networks with economic pull factors in destination countries, and find that larger...

The geographic spread of nations would pose logistics challenges in production, distribution and servicing, impacting costs, with implications for entrepreneurship. Using panel data from 62 countries spanning the years 2006 to 2021, we find that of the different oceanic geographic dimensions...