Where do entrepreneurs come from?
详细信息
文摘
This dissertation studies the genesis of entrepreneurship. Spinoffs, that is employees leaving their employers to start a new firm, are an increasingly important type of entry in human capital-intensive industries. Nonetheless, many of the most successful entrepreneurs, like Gates, Dell, etc., did not work for anybody else before launching their own companies. I construct a model a la Boyd & Prescott, in which people invest in entrepreneurial human capital by working for somebody else at early stages of their careers. Because their comparative advantage is in doing business and supervising their workers rather than “training” them to be the entrepreneurs of tomorrow, the best entrepreneurs will run bigger firms but will not train people. Because the foregone-earnings costs of training for them are too high, the ablest people will start their own companies at a young age without any training, just as Dell and Gates did. I show that people seeking managerial training will work for small companies which offer more of it. I give evidence that spinoffs are more common among small firms, just as the model predicts.