We exploit a mortgage reform that differentially unlocked home equity across the Danish population and study how this impacted selection into entrepreneurship. We find that increased entry was concentrated among entrepreneurs whose firms were founded in industries where they had no prior work...

Past work has shown that failure tolerance by principals has the potential to stimulate innovation, but has not examined how this affects which projects principals will start. We demonstrate that failure tolerance has an equilibrium price ― in terms of an investor's required share of equity...

We use loan-level data to study how the organizational structure of banks impacts small business lending. We find that decentralized banks ― where branch managers have greater autonomy over lending decisions ― give larger loans to small firms and those with “soft information”. However,...

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...