Suchergebnisse

The transfer of complex knowledge and skills is difficult, often requiring intensive interaction and extensive periods of coworking between a mentor and mentee, which is particularly true in apprenticeship-like settings and on-the-job training. This paper studies a context that quintessentially describes this type of learning: the academic laboratory. I focus on ways a change in the attention of a principal investigator, moving to entrepreneurship, may influence knowledge transmission and skill development by examining the relationship of this change with their PhD students' scientific productivity and careers. To do so, I rely on novel restricted-access data encompassing faculty and PhD students in computer sciences, engineering, and the life sciences who were active at an elite U.S. research university from 2001 to 2017. The results suggest a substantial negative association between a professor's entrepreneurial activity and the short- and long-run publication output of the PhD students they train. Furthermore, I detect a decrease in students' likelihood of becoming professors themselves but an increase in their likelihood of working for consulting firms on graduation. Finally, I provide evidence suggesting that changes in trainee development are the most feasible drivers of the results rather than changes in trainee research orientation, selection, or life cycle effects. Funding: This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [NSF SciSIP Dissertation Improvement Grant 1933387]. The author thanks the Harvard Business School Division of Research and Faculty Development for further financial support. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.1633 .

We assess the heterogeneous impact of economic downturns on individuals' decisions to bring high-technology ideas to the market in the form of new ventures. We thereby examine how worsening labor market conditions influence individuals' opportunity costs of starting new ventures, the resulting composition of the entrepreneurial pool, and start-up performance outcomes. Using a rich data set of start-up founders in the biotechnology and medical device sectors, we find that an increase in the unemployment rate is associated with a substantial rise in the share of entrepreneurs who are most sensitive to worsening labor market conditions. Additionally, we find that start-ups founded by these entrepreneurs display lower financial and innovative performance than start-ups founded by entrepreneurs who are relatively insensitive to business cycles. Finally, we provide suggestive evidence that individuals' heterogeneous response to worsening labor market conditions is a relevant factor in explaining the negative relationship between unemployment and start-up performance outcomes.