The State of American Entrepreneurship: New Estimates of the Quantity and Quality of Entrepreneurship for 32 US States, 1988–2014

American Economic Journal Economic Policy · 165 citations

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Economics

Assessing the state of American entrepreneurship requires not simply counting the quantity but also the initial quality of new ventures. Combining comprehensive business registries and predictive analytics, we present estimates of entrepreneurial quantity and quality from 1988 to 2014. Rather than a secular pattern of declining business dynamism, our quality-adjusted measures follow a cyclical pattern sensitive to economic and capital market conditions. Consistent with the role of investment cycles as a driver of high-growth entrepreneurship, our results highlight the role of economic and institutional conditions as a driver of both initial entrepreneurial quality and the scaling of new ventures over time.

The SPIRIT of Science: Institutional Responses to the P-Hacking Problem in Academic Clinical Trials

SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

High-skilled immigration enhances regional entrepreneurship

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2024-09-05 · 5 citations

Immigrants are highly entrepreneurial. But, what is the broader relationship between high-skilled immigration and regional entrepreneurship activity beyond the ventures that immigrants establish themselves? Using administrative data on newly awarded H-1B visas in the United States, we document a positive relationship between high-skilled immigration and regional entrepreneurship. A doubling of immigrants to a metropolitan statistical area is followed by a 6% increase in entrepreneurship within three years. In contrast, continuing H-1Bs and the arrival of unskilled immigrants (H-2B visas) do not increase regional entrepreneurship. Focusing on Indian immigrants (representing about 70% of all H-1B visas), we find the effect is stronger in metropolitan statistical areas with a larger local Indian population, but not other nationalities, suggesting that presence of conationals facilitates the relationship between high-skilled immigration and regional entrepreneurship. We present this and other evidence as consistent with a knowledge transfer mechanism.

The Impact of High-Skilled Immigration on Regional Entrepreneurship

Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09 · 1 citations

Research suggests link between the arrival of immigrants in a region and the region's subsequent economic growth through entrepreneurial activity. Yet, a gap remains in our understanding of whether higher rates of immigration might impact regional entrepreneurship by also boosting the quality of the region's entrepreneurship. We leverage country-wide publicly available administrative data of immigrants migrating to the United States on H-1B and H-2B visas to find that the arrival of high-skilled immigrants through new H-1B visas increases regional entrepreneurship. A doubling of immigrants is associated with an increase of 6% in the three-year quality-adjusted entrepreneurship at the city (CBSA) level and 5.8% at the neighborhood (ZIP Code) level. In contrast, continuing H-1Bs and the arrival of unskilled immigrants (H-2Bs) largely do not increase regional entrepreneurship. The effect of immigrants is concentrated in increasing the quality, rather than the quantity, of startups. Heterogeneity analyses suggest the effect is sensitive to the concentration of immigrant enclaves, but not to the overall income or education of the receiving region.

Third Places and Neighborhood Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Starbucks Cafés

SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

New Trends in Entrepreneurial Finance Research

Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

Entrepreneurial finance scholars address the questions and themes related to which, how, when, and why ventures attract external funding and how it affects their future development (Bellavitis et al., 2017; Block et al., 2018; Cumming et al., 2019; Cumming et al., 2022a). Most attention has been devoted to equity capital because of its pivotal role in the financing of high-growth entrepreneurship (Drover et al., 2017) and significant firm-level implications (Bonini et al., 2019; Eldridge et al., 2021; Manigart et al., 2002). While the entrepreneurial finance field is well-established, recent trends have attracted substantial scholarly attention. Specifically, an increasing focus on addressing enduring challenges, environmental, social, and governance aspects, and artificial intelligence have created a promising and exciting space to study entrepreneurial finance.

Emergence and Growth Strategy of Entrepreneurial Firms: Evidence Based on Large-Scale Data

Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

Entrepreneurial firms have long been hailed as the force that stimulates innovations, employment, and economic growth writ large. For these reasons, organization and entrepreneurship scholars have long been interested in the growth of technology firms. Considerable research over the past two decades has drawn scholarly attention to issues relating to how entrepreneurial firms emerge and grow their capabilities through specific organizational structure and processes, which have been found to exert enduring influences on subsequent organizational development. More recently, an emerging body of research has sought to understand the growth and strategy of young firms’ organizational capabilities by examining their human capital growth as well as their strategic moves. In recent years, novel, large-scale, longitudinal datasets have emerged that enabled researchers to adequately track firms’ historical growth trajectories beyond what small hand-collected samples of entrepreneurial firms can reveal. This symposium intends to gather a group of papers that have leveraged such novel, large-scale data to address unanswered questions in the literature regarding the founding patterns of entrepreneurial firms as well as growth strategies adopted by entrepreneurial firms. The Composition and Dynamics of Technology-Enabled Entrepreneurship Author: Innessa Colaiacovo; - Author: Daniel Gross; Fuqua School of Business, Duke U. Author: Jorge Guzman; Columbia Business School Opinion is Cheaper than Facts: How New Entrants Have Shaped the Business of Political News Author: Aaron Chatterji; Duke U. Author: Sharique Hasan; Fuqua School of Business, Duke U. Author: Dror Shvadron; - The Effect of Commercial, Regulatory, and Sociocultural Pressures on Hiring Strategies post-IPO Author: Beril Yalcinkaya; U. of Maryland R.H. Smith School of Business Author: Waverly W. Ding; U. of Maryland Author: Anil K Gupta; U. of Maryland College Park Startup Hiring through Firm-Driven Search: Evidence from Venture for America Author: Michael Pergler; The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania

Third Places and Neighborhood Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Starbucks Cafés

National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-06-01 · 6 citations

Sociologists have shown that "third places" such as neighborhood cafs help people maintain and use their network ties.Do they help local entrepreneurs, for whom networks are important?We examine whether the introduction of Starbucks cafs into U.S. neighborhoods with no coffee shops increased entrepreneurship.When compared to census tracts that were scheduled to receive a Starbucks but did not get one, tracts that received a Starbucks saw an increase in the number of startups of 9.1% to 18%(or 2.9 to 5.7 firms) per year, over the subsequent 7 years.A partnership between Starbucks and Magic Johnson focused on underprivileged neighborhoods produced larger effects.Several analyses suggest the effect occurs through a networks mechanism.

Accelerating Innovation Ecosystems: The Promise and Challenges of Regional Innovation Engines

Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy and the Economy · 2024 · 25 citations

• Business
• Environmental resource management
• Environmental science

Motivated by the recent establishment of major US federal programs seeking to harness the potential of regional innovation ecosystems, we assess the promise and challenges of place-based innovation policy interventions. Relative to traditional research grants, place-based innovation policy interventions are not directed toward a specific research project but rather aim to reshape interactions among researchers and other stakeholders within a given geographic location. The most recent such policy—the National Science Foundation “Engines” program—is designed to enhance the productivity and impact of the investments made within a given regional innovation ecosystem. The impact of such an intervention depends on whether, in its implementation, it induces change in the behavior of individuals and the ways in which knowledge is distributed and translated within that ecosystem. Although this logic is straightforward, from it follows an important insight: innovation ecosystem interventions—engines—are more likely to succeed when they account for the current state of a given regional ecosystem (in terms of latent capacities, current bottlenecks, and economic and institutional constraints) and when they involve extended commitments by multiple stakeholders within that ecosystem. Beyond outlining the key dependencies for place-based innovation policy interventions, we also discuss opportunities for real-time assessment and course correction of such interventions.

Climate change framing and innovator attention: Evidence from an email field experiment

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2023-01-13 · 11 citations

Drawing the attention of innovators to climate change is important for green innovation. We report an email field experiment with MIT using messages about the impact of climate change to invite innovators (SBIR grantees) to apply to a technology competition. We vary our messages on the time frame and scale of the human cost of climate change across scientifically valid scenarios. Innovator attention (clicks) is sensitive to climate change messaging. These changes in clicks also predict higher application rates. The response varies by individual characteristics such as location-based exposure to climate change risks and whether innovators have climate-related innovations. Finally, using a structural model of innovator attention, we provide estimates of the implied discount rate of time and the elasticity of attention to lives at stake.