A theory is proposed where the pay policy and size of established firms are determined together with individual workers' entrepreneurship decision. The main results are twofold. First, taking the firm size as given, larger firms tend to have less flexible wages and produce entrepreneurs of...

If entrepreneurs are liquidity constrained and cannot borrow to operate on an efficient scale, those with more personal wealth should do better than those with less wealth. We investigate this hypothesis using a unique dataset from Norway. Consistent with liquidity constraints being present, we...

We study how complementarities and intellectual property rights affect the management of knowledge workers. The main results relay when a firm will wish to sue workers that leave with innovative ideas, and the effects of complementary assets on wages and on worker initiative. We argue that firms...

The paper develops a theory which attempts to understand segmentation and fee-setting in certification markets. The basis for the theory is that certifiers offer differentiated tests; for a given object it may be more difficult to pass the test of certifier i than the test of certifier j. Given...

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...

We document three new facts about entrepreneurship. First, a majority of male entrepreneurs start a firm in the same or a closely related industry as their fathers' industry of employment. Second, this tendency is correlated with intelligence: higher-IQ entrepreneurs are less likely to follow...

We study selection contests in which the strategic variable is degree of risk rather than amount of effort. The selection efficiency of such contests is examined. We show that the selection efficiency of a contest may be improved by limiting the competition in two ways; a) by having a small...