This paper argues that a large component of success in entrepreneurship and venture capital can be attributed to skill. We show that entrepreneurs with a track record of success are more likely to succeed than first time entrepreneurs and those who have previously failed. Funding by more...

Despite the importance placed on supervision in the workplace, little is known about the effects of a boss' leadership quality on labor market outcomes such as employee job retention. Using plausibly exogenous assignment of junior officers to bosses in the U.S. Army, we find positive retention...

In this paper we examine the importance of local spillovers such as network externalities and learning from others in the diffusion of home computers using data on 110,000 U.S. households in 1997. Controlling for many individual characteristics, we find that people are more likely to buy their...

This paper introduces a new cost dataset for a commercial aircraft firm and uses this data to analyze the dynamics of learning in commercial aircraft production. This dataset is found to be inconsistent with the simple learning hypothesis, and particularly the prediction that a firm's unit cost...

Personal experiences of economic outcomes, from global financial crises to individual-level job losses, can shape individual beliefs, risk attitudes, and choices for years to come. A growing literature on experience effects shows that individuals act as if past outcomes that they experienced...

We survey work using Bayesian learning in macroeconomics, highlighting common themes and new directions. First, we present many of the common types of learning problems agents face---signal extraction problems---and trace out their effects on macro aggregates, in different strategic settings....

Many governments have engaged in policy experimentation in various forms to resolve uncertainty and facilitate learning. However, little is understood about the characteristics of policy experimentation, and how the structure of experimentation may affect policy learning and policy outcomes. We...

An information cascade is a situation in which an agent who observes others chooses the same action irrespective of the value of the agent's private information signal. Theoretical models have found that cascades result in poor information aggregation, inaccurate decisions, and fragility of mass...

This article establishes four key findings of the growing literature on experience effects in finance: (1) the long-lasting imprint of past experiences on beliefs and risk taking, (2) recency effects, (3) the domain-specificity of experience effects, and (4) imperviousness to information that is...