personnel profile

That entrepreneurship is vital to economic growth is hardly controversial. Yet, relative to the great importance of entrepreneurship in the economy, we know surprisingly little about it.

My research is motivated by the current and future economic importance of high tech entrepreneurs. Their importance will only increase as competition for innovation increases. The challenges faced by entrepreneurs are particularly salient in developing countries yet we know much less about high tech entrepreneurship outside of the United States and Europe. This research seeks to analyze and compare significant patterns and determinants of entrepreneurship in a sample of university alumni. We anticipate an impact for universities, entrepreneurs, policymakers, as well as an academic impact of this research. The ultimate objective of my research program is to find out which individual attributes, strategies and institutional arrangements optimally drive the rate and determine the direction of innovation, firm performance and ultimately economic growth. The societies that more quickly understand the underlying drivers of entrepreneurship and commercializing innovation will reap benefits in terms of economic well being and quality of life. In pursuing this objective, we seek to better understand two issues of considerable significance for entrepreneurship: the institutional and individual-level factors involved in deciding to become an entrepreneur. In addition, we seek to better understand the factors that shape what type of company is founded (including the impact on the economy and innovation). Innovation takes place in almost every country and location on the globe. However, we still do not have a clear understanding of why some firms pursue this activity while others in the same industry do not. Since regional and national government leaders perceive innovation to be a driver of economic growth, they are eager to replicate the technology-based entrepreneurial firms characterized by Silicon Valley and the Boston Route 128 areas in the United States. My research is motivated by the current and future economic importance of high tech entrepreneurs. The cha

I have conducted a survey of Tsinghua University alumni resulting in a database of 3,000 individuals and over 500 entrepreneurs in China.

“Who has ‘The Right Stuff’? Human Capital, Entrepreneurship and Institutional Change in China” examines a model distinguishing barriers to entry from barriers to growth. It exploits a natural experiment to identify effects on individuals at different locations on a talent distribution. The paper asks whether the 1999 Chinese Constitutional amendment increased entrepreneurship among those individuals with higher (or lower) levels of human capital. The type of institutional environment that results in higher quality entrepreneurs is a question that has not been systematically explored previously. The results have implications for our theoretical understanding of the interplay of institutional and individual factors in entrepreneurship, as well as important policy implications given the desire of governments to encourage high impact technology entrepreneurship. The difficulty in studying the institutional drivers of changes in the distribution of talent drawn into entrepreneurship is two-fold. First, one needs a context with an exogenous change in institutions. Second, obtaining detailed data on human capital levels for a comparable ‘at-risk’ set of individuals is difficult. For this study, I collected original data through a survey sent to all alumni of Tsinghua University, (Beijing) including data on graduates from 1947 to 2007, along with interviews in the People’s Republic of China during the summer of 2007. This is the first large scale dataset of technically trained Chinese entrepreneurs and the first alumni survey abroad. To study how different institutional environments may differentially impact the propensity for entrepreneurship among more talented individuals, a differences-in-differences approach is implemented. The data include panel data on income along with detailed work history and educational information.

My other project involves the analysis of a database of 43,000 MIT alumni including over 2,100 entrepreneurs.

My research on firm performance examines individual level factors and idea quality effects on entrepreneurial performance. It is unique in distinguishing effects on different stages of performance, disentangling prior founding experience from underlying ability and again in examining different institutional contexts. My paper entitled “Cutting Your Teeth: Learning from Rare Experiences” with Professor Edward Roberts looks at evidence for improvements in performance due to learning-by-doing in a context of rare, heterogeneous events. This paper investigates whether prior founding experience improves subsequent start-up firm performance. Distinguishing the effects of higher ability individuals selecting into serial entrepreneurship from a learning-by-doing story requires detailed data on each firm started by an entrepreneur, regardless of its success or venture capital funding. I exploit such data from the MIT Founder’s Survey (Hsu, Roberts, Eesley 2007) to analyze multiple measures of performance with (and without) individual fixed effects as a control for underlying individual-level factors such as skill or persistence. The results provide evidence consistent with a learning-by-doing story. Next, my paper “Entrepreneurial Ventures from Technology-Based Universities: Evidence from MIT” joint with David Hsu (Wharton) and Edward Roberts (MIT) examines whether individual level factors or idea quality play a bigger role in start-up performance over time. Another paper, “Comparing High Tech Entrepreneurial Ventures from the U.S. and China” (still in progress) will take advantage of the comparable data from the MIT and Tsinghua surveys on individuals with similar educational backgrounds in top engineering schools who are starting firms in very similar industries (dominated by electronics and software). A key question is whether there may be different drivers of performance in each country and whether these may be converging over time or diverging due to differe

Eesley, Charles E.; Hsu, David; Roberts, Edward B.

SIEPR Seminar Stanford University

2009-9-23

Organizational design in the context of new venture development is particularly challenging due to initially severe resource constraints. Deepening our understanding of differential productivity in the startup resource assembly process is therefore important. We address the twin questions of what assets are important to venture performance, and under what conditions are those assets especially important? We do so by considering initial venture idea assets and founder contracting experience. The resource-based view of the firm stresses developing the right assets, which accords with idea assets. Firm boundary theories of the firm emphasize structuring relationships in the right way given a set of organizational assets, which accords with founder contracting experience. Using unique survey data, we find that neither view by itself is as important as both theories taken together. We therefore advance an integrated perspective by showing that new ventures perform better when they both iden

Charles Eesley

Washington University

2009-10-7

Neurocognition in Schizophrenia

Keefe, Richard; Eesley, Charles

Benjamin Sadock, M.D., Virginia A. Sadock, M.D., and Pedro Ruiz, M.D. Editors.

Baltimore, MD: Lippincott, Williams, & Wilkins.

2009

Private Environmental Activism and the Selection and Response of Firm Targets.

Lenox, M. and Eesley, C.

Journal of Economics & Management Strategy , Volume 18 , Number 1

2009

Lenox, M. and Eesley, C. 2009. Private Environmental Activism and the Selection and Response of Firm Targets. , 18(1), 45-73.

Entrepreneurs from Technology-Based Universities: Evidence from MIT.

Hsu, David; Roberts, E.B.; Eesley, Charles.

Research Policy , Volume 36 , Number 768-788

2007

Implementing a Public Subsidy for Vaccines.

Sloan, Frank A.; Eesley, Charles.

Frank A. Sloan and Chee-Ruey Hsieh

Cambridge University Press

2007

Firm Responses to Secondary Stakeholder Action.

Eesley, Charles; Lenox, Michael

Strategic Management Journal , Volume 27 , Number 8

2006-11-3

765-781.