Riding the Dragon : Entrepreneurship under Market Transition

This dissertation focuses on three of the most important questions in entrepreneurship study, namely venture financing, corporate strategy and firm performance. The main thrust of the dissertation is to elaborate the mechanisms through which institutional and social factors impact entrepreneurial activities in developing countries. The first essay, "Evaluation or Attention", examines the causal mechanisms of social ties in venture financing. A staged model of network effects is developed, showing that the prior literature has drawn erroneous conclusions about the role of social ties as they conflate VC's evaluation of entrepreneurs with the necessary preceding act of becoming aware of them. The second essay, coauthored with Yasheng Huang, examines the institutional driver of local entrepreneur's foreign direct investment (FDI) seeking behavior. We find that the Chinese economic system has a political pecking order in which private enterprises are located at the bottom. FDI-seeking behavior, while diluting local entrepreneurs' ownership controls, helps change their firms' political status to transcend institutional constraints. The third essay examines the role of bureaucratic legacy upon entrepreneurial performance. I find that Chinese entrepreneurs with work experiences in the public sector have better access to state controlled resources but low efficiency in utilizing these resources. This pattern reflects that entrepreneurs are organizational products: individuals' past work experiences shape both their positions within the social structure and the organizational blueprints that they transfer to new ventures. Thesis Supervisor: Yasheng Huang Title: China Program Professor in International Management Thesis Supervisor: Edward B. Roberts Title: David Sarnoff Professor of the Management of Technology