We establish a correlation between the hierarchical structure of a firm and the likelihood of business creation among its former employees, using a sample of 16 million observations of Swedish workers and a novel proxy for hierarchies based on occupation data. Conditional on firm size and many...

We study the behavioral drivers of market entry. An experiment allows us to disentangle the impact on entry across different types of markets of two key behavioral mechanisms: overconfidence and attitude toward ambiguity. We theorize and show that the causal effect of overconfidence on entry is...

We extend a model developed by Evans and Jovanovic (1989) to explain when start-ups are credit constrained. We show that the magnitude of the credit constraint is conditioned by the relative productivity of human capital in both wage work and self-employment. The effect of predicted household...