Essays on entrepreneurship

Abstract

This dissertation explores entrepreneurship at the level of articles, individuals, and firms. In the first chapter, we examine how entrepreneurship research (ER) has evolved by introducing unsupervised-machine learning. We find that ER has been summarized by eleven groups (i.e., types of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial finance, and others), and leading management journals relating to ER tend to more focused on topics associated with entrepreneurial opportunities and institutional entrepreneurship to strengthen their scholarly domain. In the second chapter, we explore the risk propensity of social entrepreneurs comparing to commercial entrepreneurs because pursuing social benefits may affect entrepreneurs’ risk-seeking behaviors. Using propensity score matching, we show that social entrepreneurs tend to have about 15% risk-seeking propensity than commercial entrepreneurs more. In the third chapter, we examine the effects of a government matching R&D subsidy to startups’ subsequent investment and innovation. Using a regression discontinuity, we find that startups funded by TIPS obtain more patents and subsequent investments than startups not supported by the program.