We examine whether the likelihood of entrepreneurial activity is related to the prior career experiences of an individual's coworkers, using a unique matched employer-employee panel data set. We argue that coworkers can increase the likelihood that an individual will perceive entrepreneurial...

We find that venture capital-backed startups receiving their initial investment in hot markets are more likely to go bankrupt, but conditional on going public, are valued higher on the day of their initial public offering, have more patents, and have more citations to their patents. Our results...

Entrepreneurship research is on the rise but many questions about the fundamental nature of entrepreneurship still exist. We argue that entrepreneurship is about experimentation; the probabilities of success are low, extremely skewed, and unknowable until an investment is made. At a macro level,...

There is a growing body of evidence that many entrepreneurs seem to enter and persist in entrepreneurship despite earning low risk-adjusted returns. This has lead to attempts to provide explanations—using both standard economic theory and behavioral economics—for why certain individuals may...

We use loan-level data to study how the organizational structure of banks impacts small business lending. We find that decentralized banks—where branch managers have greater autonomy over lending decisions—give larger loans to small firms and those with “soft information.” However,...

We find a negative relationship between bank distress and the level, quality and trajectory of firm-level innovation during the Great Depression, particularly for R&D firms operating in capital intensive industries. However, we also show that because a sufficient number of R&D intensive firms...

We examine the effect of U.S. branch banking deregulations on the entry size of new firms, using micro-data from the U.S. Census Bureau. We find that the average entry size for startups did not change following the deregulations. However, among firms that survived at least four years, a greater...