We examine the role of human capital in employees' decisions to leave their parent firms and form spinouts. Using a large sample of individuals who formed spinouts in manufacturing industries between 1992 and 2005, and their co-workers who did not, we find that after controlling for age,...

This study examines how the human capital of spinout founders and the performance of parent firms affect the success of spinouts by using a matched employer-employee dataset of new ventures covering 7 SIC 1-digit sectors in the United States. Our data cover 29,100 spinouts and 379,800 new...