We examine the effect of US branch banking deregulations on the entry size of new firms using micro-data from the US Census Bureau. We find that the average entry size for startups did not change following the deregulations. However, among firms that survived at least four years, a greater...

Financing constraints are one of the biggest concerns impacting potential entrepreneurs around the world. Given the important role that entrepreneurship is believed to play in the process of economic growth, alleviating financing constraints for would-be entrepreneurs is also an important goal...

We use Census micro data to shed new light on how growth in house prices boosts US entrepreneurship. At the height of the 2007 real estate boom, 5% of self-employed individuals and 12% of employer-businesses used home equity to partly or wholly finance a new business. Despite this frequency,...

The fundamental uncertainty of new technologies at their earliest stages implies that it is virtually impossible to know the true potential of a venture without learning about its viability through a sequence of investments over time. We show how this process of experimentation can be...

We study how a mortgage reform that exogenously increased access to credit had an impact on entrepreneurship, using individual-level micro data from Denmark. The reform allows us to disentangle the role of credit access from wealth effects that typically confound analyses of the collateral...

We study how technological shocks to the cost of starting new businesses have led the venture capital model to adapt in fundamental ways over the prior decade. We both document and provide a framework to understand the changes in the investment strategy of venture capitalists (VCs) in recent...

Using data from a prominent online platform for launching new digital products, we document that the composition of the platform's ‘beta testers’ on the day a new product is launched has a systematic and persistent impact on the venture's success. Specifically, we use word embedding methods...

We document new facts on the evolution of founder-CEO compensation in venture capital-backed startups. Having a tangible product ("product market fit") is a fundamental milestone in CEOs' compensation, marking the point where liquid cash compensation increases significantly -- well before an IPO...

Exploiting random variation in the number of venture capitalist (VC) judges assigned to panels at Harvard Business School’s New Venture Competition (NVC) between 2000 and 2015, we find that exposure to more VC judges increases male participants’ chances of founding a VC-backed startup after...