Many observers, and many investors, believe that young people are especially likely to produce the most successful new firms. We use administrative data at the U.S. Census Bureau to study the ages of founders of growth-oriented start-ups in the past decade. Our primary finding is that successful...

We study how the disclosure of corrupt practices affects the growth of firms involved in illegal interactions with the government using randomized audits of public procurement in Brazil. On average, firms exposed by the anti-corruption program grow larger after the audits, despite experiencing a...

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...

We show that Tobin's q, as proxied by the ratio of the firm's market value to its book value, increases with the firm's systematic equity risk and falls with the firm's unsystematic equity risk. Further, an increase in the firm's total equity risk is associated with a fall in q. The negative...

A fundamental problem entrepreneurs face in the formative stages of their businesses is how to provide incentives for employees to protect, rather than steal, the source of organizational rents. We study how the entrepreneur's response to this problem will determine the organization's internal...

Using a unique database on all Japanese manufacturing plants in the United States, we examine the relationship between plant size and growth for these foreign-owned plants. These plants average sizes are three times larger than comparable U.S. plants and experienced 30 percent growth from 1987...

We investigate how firms adapt to trademark protection, an extensively used but underexamined form of IP protection, by exploring a historical precedent: China's trademark law of 1923---an unanticipated and disapproved response to end foreign privileges in China. By exploiting a unique, newly...

Population growth has declined markedly in almost all major economies since the 1970s. We argue this trend has important consequences for the process of firm dynamics and aggregate growth. We study a rich semi-endogenous growth model of firm dynamics, and show analytically that a decline in...

India's Industrial Disputes Act (IDA) of 1947 requires firm with more than 100 workers to pay large costs if they shrink their employment. Since the early 2000s, large Indian manufacturing firms have increasingly relied on contract workers who are not subject to the IDA. By 2015, contract...