We construct a simple model of occupational choice among agents with differing abilities. The fraction of agents creating new businesses who are low ability rises during recessions. Thus, cohorts born during recessions are on average lower quality: their businesses yield lower initial earnings,...

Private information induces individuals to self-select as subjects into clinical research trials, and it induces researchers to select which trials they conduct. We show that selection can induce ex ante therapeutic misconception and ex post disappointment among research subjects; and it...

Recent evidence has shown that entrants into self-employment are disproportionately drawn from the tails of the earnings and ability distributions. This observation is explained by a multi-task model of occupational choice in which frictions in the labor market induces mismatches between firms...

Most existing models of employee spinoffs assume they are driven by a desire to implement new ideas. However, history is replete with examples of spinoffs that were launched to continue with old ideas that their parents were in the process of abandoning. We develop a model of technology choice...

A growing empirical literature on spinoff formation has begun to reveal some striking regularities about which firms are most likely to spawn spinoffs, when they are most likely to spawn them, and the relationship between the quality of the parent firm and its spinoffs. Deeper investigations...