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FSRDC Network Presentation: Entrepreneurial Spillovers Across Coworkers

Please join us for Dr. Melanie Wallskog’s presentation titled “Entrepreneurial Spillovers across Coworkers.” Melanie Wallskog is an Assistant Professor of Finance at Duke University. Her research spans the areas of labor economics, entrepreneurship, and corporate finance.

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Date and time: Wednesday, Jul 27, 2022 1:00 pm | EDT
Join link: https://uscensus.webex.com/uscensus/j.php?MTID=m004b1136feaeb3eadd9e8ea34c6532db
Access code/Meeting number, if needed: 2760 174 5684
Webinar password, if needed: #Census1

Abstract: Using large-scale administrative data, I track the employment and entrepreneurship of over forty million Americans and investigate entrepreneurial spillovers across coworkers, based on the idea that individuals who start their own firms learn institutional knowledge and entrepreneurial skills that they may teach others. I find that an individual whose current coworkers have more prior entrepreneurship experience is more likely to become an entrepreneur themself within the next five years, and these spillovers are strongest among workers with similar jobs and demographics. Furthermore, an individual is more likely to become a successful entrepreneur if those coworkers were themselves successful entrepreneurs. To quantify the role of these spillovers, I build a structural model of entrepreneurship and learning and estimate that the aggregate entrepreneurship rate would be 10% lower in the absence of learning.