How do venture capital investors react to social movements, including those that relate to historical underrepresentation in funding? We use image and name algorithms combined with clerical review to classify race for 150,000 founders and 30,000 investors. These data allow us to assess the...

When startup innovation involves a potentially disruptive technology - initially lagging in the predominant performance metric, but with a potentially favorable trajectory of improvement - incumbents may be wary of engaging in cooperative commercialization with the startup. While the prevailing...

Young workers typically enter the professional labor market only after completing higher education. We investigate how earlier professional work experience affects skilled worker development. In a field experiment, 1,787 Engineering majors were randomly assigned to 6-month work terms to begin...

We estimate the effect of patent protection on follow-on investments in corporate scientific research. We exploit a new method for identifying an exogenous reduction in the protection a granted patent provides. Using data on public, research-active firms between 1990 and 2015, we find that firms...

To what extent does high-growth entrepreneurship depend on skilled human capital? We estimate the impact of the inflow of inventors into a region on the founding of high-growth firms, instrumenting mobility with the county-level share of millions of inventor surnames in the 1940 U.S. Census....

Which factors shape the commercialization of academic scientific discoveries via startup formation? Prior literature has identified several contributing factors but does not address the fundamental problem that the commercial potential of a nascent discovery is generally unobserved, which...

We analyze determinants of access to venture capital for Black founders of high-growth startups. We combine image- and name-processing algorithms with clerical review to identify race for over 100,000 startup founders "at risk" for venture funding. Black founders raise roughly one-third as much...

We analyze more than 70 million scientific articles to characterize the gender dynamics of commercializing science. The double-digit gender gap we report is explained neither by the quality of the science nor its ex-ante commercial potential, and is widest among papers with female last authors...