One of the leading theories of entrepreneurship is that less risk averse individuals become entrepreneurs and more risk averse individuals become their employees. Kihlstrom and Laffont (1979) formalized this insight in an elegant and widely taught general equilibrium model. However, their model...

We investigate entry in a dynastic entrepreneurship (overlapping generations) environment created by employee spinoffs. Without finance constraints, enforcement of non-compete agreements unambiguously improves social welfare outcomes, and even increases the rate of spinoffs from original firms....

Many empirical studies have found a positive relationship between openness and growth in per capita GDP in less developed countries, and economists have produced many explanations for this correlation. However, the existing studies are consistent with all of these theories and thus do not...

Many founding teams of new firms form at a common employer. We model team formation and the entry of employee spinoffs by extending the Jovanovic (1979) theory of job matching and employer learning. In our social-capital model employees learn about their colleagues' characteristics at a faster...

Recently collected data show that, within any manufacturing industry, vertically integrated firms tend to have larger, higher productivity plants, account for the bulk of sales, and also sell externally most of the inputs they produce. In a weak contracting environment characteristic of...

Some cultural goods, like clothes and films, are consumed socially and are thus characterized by the same consumption network externalities as languages. At the same time, producers of new cultural goods in any one country draw on the stock of ideas generated by previous cultural production in...

When will an industry subject to agglomeration economies move from an old, high-cost site to a new, low-cost site? It is argued that history, in the form of sunk costs resulting from the operation of many firms at a site, creates a first-mover disadvantage that can prevent relocation. It is...

Recent work in the sociology of economic development has emphasized the establishment of a professional government bureaucracy in place of political appointees as an important component of the institutional environment in which private enterprise can flourish. I focus on the role that internal...

A mechanism of endogenous growth suitable for investigation of sectoral or regional interaction is developed. It is shown how the high value placed on production linkages by economic historians might be reconciled with the high value placed on openness (often implying lack of linkages) by...

Recent work in the sociology of economic development has emphasized the establishment of a professional bureaucracy in place of political appointees as an important component of the institutional environment in which private enterprise can flourish. I hypothesize that establishment of such a...