Data-driven entrepreneurship research
Discussion and collaboration in the NCER network center around common interests and current research. Two themes are particularly pertinent to NCER activities:
Beyond econometrics
The increasing availability of and familiarity with analytical tools based on machine learning opens new paths for research in many fields of social science. What opportunities await Nordic entrepreneurship research?
Beyond register-based data
With population-wide coverage and formidable quality, Nordic register data has been an important source of scholarly opportunity for entrepreneurship researchers for many years. Over time, the limitations of such data have also become clear. What new data combinations from registers, surveys, web scraping, etc., may allow us to take the next steps?
Recent publications
Employees’ entrepreneurial human capital and firm performance
Pontus Braunerhjelm, Emma Lappi, March 2023, In: Research Policy. 52, 2, 104703
We introduce a new measure of human capital, defined as employees’ former involvement in entrepreneurship. Such entrepreneurial human capital (EHC) complements traditional human capital measures accumulated through work experience and education. Using detailed longitudinal register data, we track the previous years of entrepreneurial experience for the population of employees in Swedish private sector firms. We provide evidence that higher EHC among employees is associated with significantly higher levels of firm productivity. The baseline result implies that a 10 % increase in employees being former entrepreneurs increases firm-level productivity by 3.9 %. Additionally, we provide evidence that heterogeneity in employees’ previous entrepreneurial experience (e.g., the reason for entering and exiting entrepreneurship, type of venture, length of entrepreneurial experiences, and relatedness of technology) influences the impact of EHC on productivity. The results are shown to be robust to various estimation techniques, alternative definitions of EHC, and other performance measures.
Learning from Their Daughters: Family Exposure to Gender Disparity and Female Representation in Male-Led Ventures
Zhiyan Wu, Lucia Naldi, Karl Wennberg, Timur Uman, March 2023, In: Management Science.
We build on recent studies on daughter-to-father influence to explore how male founders’ fatherhood of daughters impacts female representation in their ventures. We find that, conditional on the total number of children, fathering an additional daughter versus a son is associated with a 4% (11%) increase in female director (employee) representation. This daughter-to-father effect gradually matures as daughters grow up and socialize in schools and workplaces, and it increases as daughters age, suggesting that male founders vicariously learn from their daughters about the constraints women face throughout the daughters’ life cycles. Heterogeneity analyses (regarding founder cohort, divorce status, and social class), combined with qualitative evidence, further substantiate the plausibility of vicarious learning as a potential yet understudied mechanism underlying daughter effects. In addition, daughter effects on employee recruitment are concentrated in microbusinesses (number of employees is ≤10) where the founder is close in decision authority to all employees. These findings add important nuances to our understanding of daughter effects in organizational contexts and extend theory of gender homophily in organizations.
Do Employees Work Less for Female Leaders? A Multi-Method Study of Entrepreneurial Firms
Olenka Kacperczyk , Peter Younkin , Vera Rocha, July 2022,
In: Organization Science.
We propose that female-founded ventures receive a lower amount of employee labor for equal pay because employees are more likely to decline requests for additional labor by female founders. First, using longitudinal matched employer-employee data covering all founders of new ventures with personnel in Portugal between 2002 and 2012, we confirm that full-time employees contribute fewer regular hours and less overtime work to female-founded firms. Second, using a series of online experiments, we show that this variation in employee labor across female and male-founded firms is partly motivated by a difference in the employee’s expectations of work demands. Specifically, employees perceive female founders’ requests for additional labor to be unfair and more difficult than expected, and both these perceptions explain the lower amount of employee labor supplied in female-founded ventures. Overall, our findings uncover a novel mechanism that helps explain the existence of a gender gap in entrepreneurship beyond the entry stage.
Jockeys, horses or teams? The selection of startups by venture capitalists
Tekin Esen, Michael S Dahl, Olav Sorenson, June 2023,
In: Journal of Business Venturing Insights
How do venture capitalists select startups? Most research to date has focused on the attributes of either the founders (the jockey) or the business idea (the horse) as the determinants of selection. Connecting information from VentureXpert to the Danish registry data allows us to extend this analysis to include information on all employees of startups (the team). To assess the importance of these factors to access to venture capital, our analysis compares startups that received funding to other startups founded at the same time and in the same industry. Consistent with the jockey hypothesis and prior research, we find that firms with more and better educated founders have a higher probability of receiving venture capital. However, high-quality employees appear to matter even more than founders to the probability of being funded.