Entrepreneurship Working Group.

• Position: Bureau News

The NBER's Entrepreneurship Working Group met in Cambridge on March 10. NBER Research Associate Josh Lerner of the Harvard Business School, who directs this group, organized the following program:

Entrepreneurship in the Service Sector

Francine Lafontaine, University of Michigan, and Renata Kosova, George Washington University, "Firm Survival and Growth in Retail and Service Industries: Evidence from Franchised Chains"

Discussant: Eric Van Den Steen, MIT

Iain M. Cockburn, Boston University and NBER, and Stefan Wagner, INNO-tech, "Patents and the Survival Of Internet-Related IPOs"

Discussant: Baruch Lev, New York University

David G. Blanchflower, Dartmouth College and NBER, and Jon Wainwright, NERA Economic Consulting, "An Analysis of the Impact of Affirmative Action Programs on Self-Employment in the Construction Industry" (NBER Working Paper No. 11793)

Discussant: Scott Wallsten, AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies

Entrepreneurial Finance

Antoinette Schoar, MIT and NBER, "Judge Specific Differences in Chapter 11 and the Effect on Firm Outcomes?" Discussant: Karin Thorburn, Dartmouth College

Robert W. Fairlie, University of California, Santa Cruz, and Harry A. Krashinsky, University of Toronto, "Liquidity Constraints, Household Wealth, and Entrepreneurship Revisited"

Discussant: Annamaria Lusardi, Dartmouth College and NBER

Boyan Jovanovic, New York University and NBER, and Balazs Szentes, University of Chicago, "An Estimated Model of the Market for Venture Capital"

Discussant: Lucy White, Harvard University

Kosova and Lafontaine analyze the survival and growth of franchised chains using an unbalanced panel data set that covers about 1000 franchised chains each year from 1980 to 2001. The empirical literature on firm survival and growth has focused almost exclusively on manufacturing. This analysis allows the authors to explore whether chain age and size have the same effect on the survival and growth of retail and service chains as firm and establishment age and size have been found to have on survival and growth in manufacturing. In addition, while the researchers focus on the effect of age and size as the prior literature has done, their large and long panel data set allows them to control for the first time for chain-specific effects as well as for other chain characteristics that might affect chain survival and growth. They find that controlling for chain-level unobserved heterogeneity is statistically warranted, and...