Entrepreneurship.

• Position: Program and Working Group Meetings

The NBER'S Working Group on Entrepreneurship met in Cambridge on March 9. The Group's Director Josh Lerner of the Harvard Business School organized the meeting. These papers were discussed:

Revisionist Views of the Technology Bubble

Brent Goldfarb and David Kirsch, University of Maryland; and David A. Miller, University of California, San Diego, "Was There Too Little Entry in the Dot Com Era?"

Discussant: Shane Greenstein, Northwestern University and NBER

Lubos Pastor and Pietro Veronesi, University of Chicago and NBER, and Lucian Taylor, University of Chicago,

"Entrepreneurial Learning, the IPO Decision, and the Post-IPO Drop in Firm Profitability" (NBER Working Paper No. 12792)

Discussant: Ivo Welch, Brown University and NBER

Capital Constraints Revisited

Kaivin Munshi, Brown University and NBER, "From Farming to International Business: The Social Auspices of Entrepreneurship in a Growing Economy"

Discussant: Asim Ijaz Khwaja, Harvard University

Asli Demirguc-Kunt and Leora Klapper, The World Bank, and Georgios Panos, University of Aberdeen Business School, "The Origins of Self-Employment"

Discussant: Simon Johnson, MIT and NBER

The Growth and Evolution of Entrepreneurship in Emerging Markets

William Kerr, Harvard University, and Ramana Nanda, MIT, "Banking Deregulation, Financing Constraints and Entrepreneurship"

Discussant, Phil Strahan, Boston College and NBER

Camilo Mondragon-Velez, Georgetown University, "The Transition to Entrepreneurship: Human Capital, Wealth and the Role of Liquidity Constraints"

Discussant: Francisco Buerra, Northwestern University

Goldfarb, Kirsch, and Miller present four stylized facts about the Dot Com Era: 1) there was a widespread belief in a "Get Big Fast" business strategy; 2) the increase and decrease in public and private equity investment was most prominent in the internet and information technology sectors; 3) the survival rate of dot com firms is on a par with, or higher than, other emerging industries; and 4) firm survival is independent of private equity funding. To connect these findings, the researchers offer a herding model that accommodates a divergence between the information and incentives of venture capitalists and their investors. The Get-Big-Fast belief may have led to overly focused investment in too few internet startups and, as a result, too little entry, they conclude.

Pastor, Veronesi, and Taylor develop a model in which an entrepreneur learns about the average profitability of a...