Immigrants can expand labor supply and compete for jobs with native-born workers. But immigrants may also start new firms, expanding demand. This paper uses US administrative data other sources to study the role of in entrepreneurship. We ask how often companies, many these firms create, founded by individuals compare. A simple model provides a measurement framework addressing dual roles as fou...

Social enterprises have attracted increased attention from both researchers and practitioners around the world. In social enterprise context, scaling impact is considered main currency or key performance metric. Two overarching strategies are organizational growth strategy ecosystem strategy. However, to date, little cumulative knowledge exists on these two strategies. To address this issue, ar...

We study how to design an optimal government loan program for risky R&D projects with positive externalities. With adverse selection, the contract involves a high interest rate but nearly zero cofinancing by entrepreneur. This contrasts sharply observed schemes. selection and moral hazard, allowing two levels of effort entrepreneur, policy consists menu at most contracts, one self-financing...

Using data of the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) earnings differentials between self-employed and wage-employed workers in the German labor market are explored. Previous research based on US data reports lower incomes for entrepreneurs. In contrast to that, the findings of this contribution suggest the opposite for German entrepreneurs. They have considerably higher earnings than wage-empl...

Policy makers have long been interested in whether tax policies can be used to encourage entrepreneurial activity, but prior studies have produced ambiguous results. We use a twelveyear panel of tax return data to examine the effects of tax rates on entrepreneurial entry. We calculate household-level tax rates and employ multiple measures of entrepreneurship. Our results offer convincing eviden...

Does the lack of peers contribute to the observed gender gap in entrepreneurial success? A random sample of customers of India’s largest women’s bank was offered two days of business counseling, and a random subsample was invited to attend with a friend. The intervention significantly increased participants’ business activity, but only if they were trained with a friend. Those trained with a fr...

Field Editor: G. Cassar Wedocument the role of entrepreneurial founder and venture capital (VC) partner co-ethnicity in shaping investment relationships. Co-ethnicity increases the likelihood that a VC firm invests in a company. Conditional on investment, co-ethnicity strengthens the degree of involvement by raising the likelihood of VC board of director involvement and increasing the size and ...

Necessity spin-offs are organized by employees of incumbent firms to escape deteriorating job conditions. This paper proposes a conceptual model of the spin-off process. Necessity spin-offs are distinguished from opportunity spin-offs on the basis of their triggering events. An empirical analysis of German laser spin-offs traces differences in the performance and determinants of the two types o...

Risk Tolerance and Entrepreneurship A tradition from Knight (1921) argues that more risk tolerant individuals are more likely to become entrepreneurs, but perform worse. We test these predictions with two risk tolerance proxies: stock market participation and personal leverage. Using investment data for 400,000 individuals, we find that common stock investors are around 50 percent more likely t...

This paper analyses the effect of piracy on innovation in the presence of R&D competition with technological and market uncertainty. With a single innovating firm facing technological uncertainty, piracy unambiguously retards innovation. However, with R&D competition where firms face market and technological uncertainties, we show that piracy may enhance overall innovation. We also show that if...