Browsing by Subject "Entrepreneurship"

Now showing 1 - 14 of 14

Design, Business Models, and Embedded Values: Developing a mentor program management platform as a model of humane technology
(2022-05) Wold, Ryan
Mentor programs proliferate across society and the benefits to participants and the sponsoring organizations have been extensively documented, yet mentor program coordinators face many structural, financial, and technological challenges. These challenges have been exacerbated as technology continues to play an increasingly central role in the facilitation of mentor programs. In response to the technologization of mentor programs and the reality that mentor programs are validated but struggling, this dissertation explores how the principles of humane technology could be used to developa platform that helps mentor program coordinators navigate these challenges. The data from the first stage of a participatory design research process that included immersion in the world of mentor program management and interviews with mentor program coordinators from universities, government, non-profits, and startup accelerators, revealed that mentor program coordinators encounter a series of conflicts intrinsic to mentor program management, for example they encounter conflicting desires to provide participants more autonomy or more structure. As mentor program coordinators attempt to navigate the conflicts associated with sustaining a mentor program, they find themselves acting as part technology designer, part entrepreneur, part technical communicator, and part social justice advocate. This dissertation concludes by providing a critical reflection and recommendations for how mentor program coordinators can apply the principles of humane technology when making decisions about the design, business model, and embedded values of a mentor program.
Does it matter how you tell it? On how entrepreneurial storytelling affects the opportunity evaluations of early-stage investors
(2012-12) Villanueva, Jaume
This research examines whether and how entrepreneurial storytelling can influence early-stage investors' evaluations of new venture opportunities, by articulating and empirically testing a theoretical model that specifies a set of potential mechanisms by which this influence could be exerted. The theoretical model is tested with a field experiment involving 188 active business angel investors across different regions in the United States. Results from the experiment suggest that storytelling exerts a number of specific indirect effects on investors' evaluations, but that these effects operate in opposite directions, effectively cancelling each other out, so that the final outcome of the manipulation on investors' evaluative judgments is unobservable. The findings of the experiment thus suggest that entrepreneurial storytelling does affect investors' evaluative judgment, but that it does so in an inconsistent manner, which implies that entrepreneurs seeking to influence investors' evaluations by communicating their opportunities in the form of a story will have to find ways of capitalizing on the positive effects that storytelling seems to provide, while avoiding some of its pitfalls. The balance of this research shows that entrepreneurial stories can influence the evaluative judgments of early-stage investors, and opens the door for further research on the role of communication strategies in the entrepreneurial resource acquisition process.
Entrepreneurship and the macroeconomy.
(2009-08) Kartashova, Katsiaryna L.
This thesis focuses on entrepreneur as an owner of a privately held business. As the name "privately held" suggests, there are no readily available markets for trading risks associated with entrepreneurs' investments in their businesses. On the contrary, investments in publicly traded companies provide opportunities for diversification of risks through trade in public equity markets. I study the characteristics of these alternative investments and their effect on decisions of entrepreneurs to invest in a portfolio of private and public equities. First, I compare empirically returns to an index of all non-traded entrepreneurial equity and to an index of publicly traded equity in the United States. Second, I study the aggregate effects of improving investment conditions in public equity markets through their influence on entrepreneurs' individual portfolio decisions. I provide explicit quantitative measures of associated changes in the welfare of entrepreneurs and levels of aggregate economic activity using data from Ecuador and Chile.
An environmental scan of early stage social entrepreneurship in developing contexts: Analysis for D-Prize
(Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, 2014-05-13) Ekeberg, Julia; Flanagan, Jesse; Golembeck, Thomas; Ha, Kiwook
Essays in Macroeconomics
(2019-07) Salgado, Sergio C.
This dissertation consists of three chapters. In the first essay of my thesis, I document a marked declined in the share of entrepreneurial households in the United States and I propose and quantify a mechanism to account for such decline. Using individual-level data, I provide evidence on the decline in the population share of entrepreneurs and in the entry rate into entrepreneurship. I also show that the decline is most concentrated among college graduates. Then, using an otherwise standard entrepreneurial choice model with two skill groups of individuals, I show that the decline in entrepreneurship is the equilibrium outcome of two forces that have increased the returns to high skill labor: the skill-biased technical change and the decrease in the cost of capital goods. I find that these two technological forces jointly account for three-quarters of the decline in the share of entrepreneurs observed in the United States over the last 30 years. In the second essay of this thesis, Nicholas Bloom, Fatih Guvenen, and I study the cyclicality the distribution of firm-leve outcomes over the business cycle. Using firm-level panel data from the US Census and for more than forty other countries, we show that the skewness of the growth rate of employment and sales is procyclical. In particular, during recessions, they display a large left tail of negative growth rates (and during booms, a large right tail of positive growth rates). These results are robust to different selection criteria, across countries, industries, and measures. We find similar results at the industry level: industries with falling growth rates see more left-skewed growth rates of firm sales. We then build a heterogeneous agents model in which entrepreneurs face shocks with time-varying skewness that matches the firm-level distributions we document for the United States. Our quantitative results show that a negative shock to the skewness of firms’ productivity growth (keeping the mean and variance constant) generates a significant and persistent drop in output, investment, hiring, and consumption. In the third and last essay of this thesis, Mons Chan, Min Xu, and I, study the importance of fluctuation of firm-level productivity in explaining the fluctuations in workers’ wages. In particular, we use matched employer-employee data from Denmark to analyze the extent to which firms’ productivity shocks are passed to workers’ wages. The richness of our dataset allows us to separately study continuing and non-continuing workers, to correct for selection, and to investigate how the passthrough varies across narrow population groups. Our results show a much larger degree of passthrough from firms’ shocks to workers’ wages than reported in previous research. On average, an increase of one standard deviation in firm-level TFP commands an increase of 3.0% in annual wages ($1,500 USD for the average worker). Furthermore, we find that the effect of productivity shocks on wage growth for workers who switch firms is larger relative to workers that stay within the same firm. Finally, we find large differences in the passthrough for workers of different income levels, ages, industries, and firms of different productivity levels. In the second part of our paper, we estimate a stochastic process of income that captures the salient features the data. We then embed the estimated stochastic process into a life-cycle consumption savings model to evaluate the welfare and distributional implications of the passthrough from firms’ TFP shocks to workers’ wages.
Essays in Macroeconomics
(2020-07) Gu, Shijun
This dissertation consists of three chapters. In the first, I perform an empirical analysis of China’s college expansion policy. First, I estimate the impact of a substantial increase in the college-educated labor supply on the college wage premium. I find that the return to college education is stable within a decade after college expansion. Second, I investigate how college expansion has affected pre-college education expenditure on children and their educational outcomes. The main finding is that the magnitude of the effect depends crucially on parents' socioeconomic backgrounds. In the second chapter, I quantitatively evaluate how China’s public college expansion program impacts human capital investment in children and inequality in the long run. To this end, I introduce a heterogeneous-agent overlapping-generations model in which altruistic parents invest in their children’s pre-college education, which can raise their children’s future working efficiency and their chance of passing the College Entrance Examination. I find that the increases in college attainment, human capital, and ex ante welfare are substantial but unevenly distributed, with disadvantaged children benefiting the least from the existing policy. The simulation also reveals that the reason for the unequal outcomes is that college expansion primarily incentivizes wealthy parents to spend more on their children’s education, which is consistent with the empirical evidence. Finally, the third chapter (joint with Lichen Zhang) studies the driving forces behind the decline in the formation of new businesses in the U.S. since the 1980s and investigates their macroeconomic implications. We devote our attention to two forces: changes in entry costs and the persistence of shocks to productivity. We develop a quantitative general equilibrium model of entrepreneurship to identify and quantify their relative importance in explaining the observed declines in new business creation. We find that the relative contribution of higher entry cost is 1.5 to 2 times larger than that of the higher persistence of shocks. Moreover, the increases in entry cost have compelled entrepreneurs to pay 15% more in terms of their first year's profit to start a business.
Essays on dynamic public policy.
(2009-08) Yazici, Hakki
This dissertation considers optimal government policy when agents in the economy are privately informed about their various characteristics. The first chapter deals with optimal education policy. Raising children is an important productive activity for a society since children's outcomes depend on their parents' investments. This paper develops an intergenerational framework in which adult outcomes are determined by parental investment, analyzes Pareto efficient allocations, and derives implications for policy. There are two key frictions: first, parental altruism type is private information; second, it is impossible for society to monitor parental investment. The main characterization result is that in any ex post Pareto efficient allocation, in any generation, society should transfer extra resources to all poor parents. This implies all agents, including the poor, should live above a certain welfare level, independent of whether or not society cares about them. Regarding implementation, the paper considers a market structure in which parents cannot sign contracts binding their descendants. Under such a market structure, implementing any Pareto efficient allocation requires government intervention. A feature shared by all Pareto efficient income tax schedules is that income taxes of agents with currently low income are negative. The second chapter analyzes efficient allocation of resources in an economy in which agents are initially heterogeneous with regard to their wealth levels and whether they have ideas or not. An agent with an idea can start a business that generates random returns. Agents have private information about (1) their initial types, (2) how they allocate their resources, and (3) the realized returns. The unobservability of returns creates a novel motive for subsidizing agents who have ideas but lack resources to invest in them. The unobservability of initial types and actions implies that the subsidy that poor agents with ideas receive is limited by incentive compatibility: the society should provide other agents with enough incentives so that they do not claim to be poor and have ideas. The paper then provides an implementation of the constrained-efficient allocation in an incomplete markets setup that is similar to the U.S. Small Business Administration's Business Loan Program.
Essays on the Microeconomics of Development in Tanzania
(2016-05) McCarthy, Aine
This dissertation contributes to a growing body of research on the microeconomics of development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Fertility, labor market participation and agriculture are key components of the microeconomic development process in Tanzania. I explore household and individual decisions in all three of these domains in Tanzania through economic analysis and impact evaluation. Both experimental and non-experimental impact evaluations improve the public understanding of what works in economic development. For the first essay in Chapter 2, I explore household fertility decisions by estimating the effect of a community family planning education program on fertility behavior in the Meatu District. In Chapter 3, I investigate the effects of an entrepreneurship training program on financial literacy and employment attitudes in the Kagera region. In Chapter 4, I analyze the impact of polygyny on agricultural productivity in farming households across the country.
The Impacts Entrepreneurship has on Economic Growth in Georgia, New Mexico, Kentucky Counties
(2016) Zhang, Qianyu; Nene, Gibson
The study is primary analyzing the impacts that entrepreneurship have on economic growth in Georgia, New Mexico and Kentucky counties between 2010 and 2012. The three states form 313 counties altogether. Economic growth in a given county can be measured by looking at the growth rate of personal per capita income, and the eight control variables include education, government spending, per capita income, unemployment, white population, rural dummy and farm dummy variable. The variables of interest are firm, establishments and employment at all sizes less than 500, which composed 15 models in terms of different firm, establishment and employment sizes. The results of this study present clear relationships between the control variables and economic growth. Farm-based counties and personal per capita income are positively related to economic growth; while government spending and population density are inversely related to economic growth. These coefficients of the variables are statistically significant and robust to all models. The coefficients for rest of the variables are not statistically significant, which means that they cannot be used to explain the economic growth in the specific period of this study.
The intercultural competence of immigrant entrepreneurs in the Twin Cities
(2014-07) Cleberg, Alexander
Seeking a more nuanced conceptualization of intercultural competence, this thesis examines the narratives of immigrant entrepreneurs engaged in a culturally diverse business environment. Based on in-depth ethnographic interviews supplemented by a quantitative instrument, the thesis uncovers unique examples of how intercultural competencies are expressed while drawing on the research expressing a need to re-conceptualize intercultural competence from a non-western perspective.
Opportunity re-evaluation: how risk dimensions influence post-investment venture capital decisions.
(2010-01) Pavone, Carla
Why do managers embrace some risks while they reject others that appear to be equally risky? This dissertation examines how risk dimensions influence the decision to hold, reinvest in, or terminate investment in companies within a venture capital portfolio. I draw on prototype theory to argue that reinvestment is more likely in portfolio companies that "look like" successful VC-backed firms, while investment termination is more likely for firms that "look like" losing portfolio companies. Financial risk is an equivocal signal because it can indicate a problem or recur by design in the VC-backed portfolio company. Different levels of market, technology and management risk are all central characteristics of portfolio winners or losers. I predict that increasing financial risk will increase the likelihood of both reinvestment and termination compared to holding the investment. However, market, technology and management risk will negatively influence reinvestment. Regarding investment termination, I argue that less controllable risks will be rejected, while firms with more controllable risk will be retained. Therefore, I predict that market risk and technology risk will positively influence termination, while management risk will have no significant effect. The sample is composed of 542 quarterly observations of 57 companies in an early-stage VC firm's portfolio. The independent variables are the VC's financial, market, technology and management risk assessments. Control variables address fund differences, portfolio company characteristics, cognitive biases, and economic context. The analysis uses multinomial time series logit to compare the likelihood of follow-on investment, investment termination, or profitable sale vs. holding the investment. With the exception of technology risk, the hypotheses are supported. I contribute to the management and entrepreneurship literatures by examining the under-researched area of risk-based decisions subsequent to an initial commitment. I also use a novel combination of prototype theory and behavioral decision theory to show how risk can be decomposed into multiple dimensions with differing effects on decision-making. Furthermore, my analysis goes beyond binary decisions to incorporate several discrete choices. Finally, this study breaks new ground by analyzing nonpublic, contemporaneous records of actual VC post-investment risk assessments and decisions.
A Phenomenological Exploration of the Apparel Sizing Practice of Small Womenswear Businesses
(2019-02) Carufel, Robin
Inconsistent garment sizing has plagued the apparel industry from its inception. Solutions to the problem require large anthropometric databases and advanced skills in statistical analysis, which small businesses have no access to or training in. To give a voice to those engaged in sizing practice, this study conducted a phenomenological inquiry into six small womenswear business’ experiences regarding sizing practice. Findings suggest three major influences on sizing practice: Financial Resources, Experience, and Designer Mindset; and three themes are presented regarding how decisions about sizing are incorporated into the apparel design process: Timing of Decisions, Fit Model, and Design Intent. This study concludes with suggestions for how to incorporate technical design and entrepreneurship into apparel design curricula to better serve the student interested in design entrepreneurship, suggestions for easy improvement of sizing practice for small womenswear businesses, as well as suggestions for future research in sizing.
Topics in macroeconomics.
(2010-11) Short, Jacob M.
This dissertation consists of two essays. In the first essay we use the occupation, incorporation and bankruptcy decisions of entrepreneurs to learn about the extent of the risks faced by entrepreneurs and the available insurance against them. Entrepreneurship is risky; entrepreneurs forgo wages and invest their time and resources into a business with large potential gains, but uninsurable risks. It is vital to know the extent of these risks, and the insurance available against them, in order to assess corporate tax and personal bankruptcy reforms. We document that incorporated entrepreneurs operate larger businesses, accumulate more wealth, and are on average more productive than unincorporated entrepreneurs. We embed the U.S. bankruptcy and incorporation legal systems in a quantitative macroeconomic theory of occupation, incorporation, and default choices that accounts for the cross-sectional facts. In the model, as in the U.S., incorporation provides insurance via limited liability beyond personal bankruptcy exemptions, at the expense of administrative burdens and an endogenous interest rate premium. Our model suggests that capital embodied shocks are important entrepreneurial risks. A calibrated economy in which each unit of installed capital entails a small probability (1.0%) of a catastrophic shock (full destruction of capital) is able to account for the data along multiple untargeted dimensions. In the second essay we analyze the savings behavior of developing economies. Developing countries experiencing rapid TFP growth tend to run current account surpluses. This finding is puzzling in the context of the neoclassical growth model, which predicts that these countries should be net borrowers (Gourinchas and Jeanne, 2009). We account for this puzzle by introducing a non-tradable sector to an otherwise standard growth model. We propose that complementarity between tradable and non-tradable goods is key. With an initially underdeveloped non-tradable sector, a representative household is willing to trade a portion of current tradable output in exchange for tradable goods in the future when its production of non-tradable goods increases. A drawback of the simplest version of the model is that faster growing countries experience a reduction in the relative price of non-tradable goods.
Youth's response to entrepreneurship education and training: a case study of out-of-school youth in Nairobi
(2013-05) Ojwang, Tom Odhiambo
Since independence, Kenya has been grappling with high levels of poverty and unemployment, with the youth being the most affected. Thus, it is against this background that governmental and non-governmental interventions to eradicate poverty and unemployment in the country largely target the youth through entrepreneurship education and training programs. Some scholars, however, contend that there has been little research on youth perspectives on the effectiveness of this approach to empower them with work and life skills. This study, therefore, examined how out-of-school youth in Nairobi responded to an NGO's entrepreneurship education and training program. Quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews with the youth participating in the NGO's program revealed that despite a few points of variance between the youth and NGO perspectives, the youth's response to the program generally conformed to the goals of the NGO itself.

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