External finance is central for nascent entrepreneurs, people in the process of starting new ventures. We argue that nascent entrepreneurs use patents and prototypes in order to signal their ability to appropriate the returns from their innovation as well as the project´s feasibility. Our...

What differentiates American capitalism from all other forms of industrial capita-lism is a historical focus on both the creation of wealth (entrepreneurship) and the reconstitution of wealth (philanthropy). Philanthropy has been part of the implicit American social contract that continuously...

This paper explores the relationship between knowledge creation, entrepreneur-ship, and economic growth in the United States over the last 150 years. Accor-ding to the "new growth theory," investments in knowledge and human capital ge-nerate economic growth via spillovers of knowledge. But the...