We debate the motivation for and effectiveness of public policies to encourage individuals to become entrepreneurs. Reviewing established evidence we find that most western world policies do not greatly reduce or solve any market failures but instead waste taxpayers' money, encourage those...

New firms are an important source of job creation, but the underlying economic mechanisms for why this is so are not well understood. Using an identification strategy that links shocks to local income to job creation in the non-tradable sector, we ask whether job creation arises more through the...

This paper asks whether startups react more to changing investment opportunities than more mature firms do. We use the fact that a region's pre-existing industrial structure creates exogenous variation in the severity of its exposure to nation-wide manufacturing shocks to develop an instrument...

The paper studies how the attitudes of entrepreneurs, in general, and family business owners, in particular, differ from others in the economy. Family business owners are entrepreneurs who operate a business with their spouse or adult children. We use data from the Survey of Consumer Finance to...

Data is a fundamental impediment to a better understanding of the multifaceted process of new firm creation. With better data, we can form a better understanding of the causes, constraints, and outcomes associated with the decision to launch a new business. Towards this end, the Kauffman...

We develop a model of private equity in which many empirical patterns arise endogenously. Our model rests solely on two critical features of this market: moral hazard for General partners (GPs) and illiquidity risk for Limited Partners (LPs). The equilibrium fund structure incentivizes GPs with...

Private equity performance, both for buyouts and venture capital, has been highly cyclical: periods of high fundraising have been followed by periods of low performance. Despite this seemingly predictable variation, we find modest gains, at best, to pursuing realistic, investable strategies that...

To test recent theories that suggest valuation errors affect merger activity, we develop a decomposition that breaks M/B into three components: the firm-specific pricing deviation from short-run industry pricing; sector-wide, short-run deviations from firms' long-run pricing; and long-run...