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Papers written by Author(s): 'Natarajan Balasubramanian'

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Viewing papers 1 through 9 of 9


  • Working Paper

    Incidence and Performance of Spinouts and Incumbent New Ventures: Role of Selection and Redeployability within Parent Firms

    September 2021

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-21-27

    Using matched employer-employee data from 30 U.S. states, we compare spinouts with new ventures formed by incumbents (INCs). We propose a selection-based framework comprising idea selection by parents to internally implement ideas as INCs, entrepreneurial selection by founders to form spinouts, and managerial selection to close ventures. Consistent with parents choosing better ideas in the idea selection stage, we find that INCs perform relatively better than spinouts, and more so with larger parents. Regarding the entrepreneurial selection stage, we find evidence consistent with resource requirements being a greater entry barrier to spinouts and greater information asymmetry promoting spinout formation. Parents' resource redeployment opportunities are associated with lower relative survival of INCs, consistent with their being subject to greater selection pressures in the managerial selection stage.
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  • Working Paper

    Human Capital, Parent Size and the Destination Industry of Spinouts

    October 2019

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-19-30

    We study how spinout founders' human capital and parent size relate to founders' propensity to stay in the same industry as their parents or to go outside the industry. Individuals with high human capital face a higher performance penalty if they form spinouts outside the parent industry, but they also face greater deterrence from large parents if they stay in that industry. Using matched employer employee data on spinout founders and their coworkers, we find that individuals with higher human capital are less likely to form spinouts in distant industries than in the parent's industry. Further, we find that as parent size increases, such individuals are less likely to form spinouts in the parent's industry and more likely to form spinouts in distant industries.
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  • Working Paper

    Locked In? The Enforceability of Covenants Not to Compete and the Careers of High-Tech Workers

    January 2017

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-17-09

    We examine how the enforceability of covenants not to compete (CNCs) affects employee mobility and wages of high-tech workers. We expect CNC enforceability to lengthen job spells and constrain mobility, but its impact on wages is ambiguous. Using a matched employer-employee dataset covering the universe of jobs in thirty U.S states, we find that higher CNC enforceability is associated with longer job spells (fewer jobs over time), and a greater chance of leaving the state for technology workers. Consistent with a 'lock-in' effect of CNCs, we find persistent wage-suppressing effects that last throughout a worker's job and employment history.
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  • Working Paper

    Spinout Formation: Do Opportunities and Constraints Benefit High Capital Founders?

    June 2015

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-15-07

    We examine the role of human capital in employees' decisions to leave their parent firms andform spinouts. Using a large sample of individuals who formed spinouts in manufacturing industries between 1992 and 2005, and their co-workers who did not, we find that after controlling for age, education level, gender and alien status, individuals with higher human capital (measured as their earnings or experience) are more likely to form spinouts. We then examine the impact of industry opportunities and constraints on the propensity of high human capital individuals to form spinouts. Counterintuitively, we find that both industry constraints (measured as industry capital intensity) and opportunities (industry R&D intensity) reduce the propensity of higher human capital individuals to form spinouts. We interpret these results as being consistent with the argument that high human capital founders are more likely to choose larger, more capital-intensive projects than low human capital individuals, and thus face greater constraints. On the other side, R&D intensive industries appear to present abundant entrepreneurial opportunities, allowing low human capital individuals to identify their own opportunities thus decreasing the relative advantage of high human capital individuals.
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  • Working Paper

    Human Capital of Spinouts

    January 2015

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-15-06

    This study examines how the human capital of spinout founders and the performance of parent firms affect the success of spinouts by using a matched employer-employee dataset of new ventures covering 7 SIC 1-digit sectors in the United States. Our data cover 29,100 spinouts and 379,800 new ventures formed by lone entrepreneurs in 23 states between 1992 and 2005. We evaluate several components of human capital: outcomes of human capital investments vs. human capital investments, task-related human capital vs. non-task-related human capital, and individual human capital vs. group capital, and examine whether these types of human capital affect spinout performance differently. We find that spinout founder's earnings (an outcome of human capital investment) and industry experience (task-related human capital) prior to spinout formation have strong positive correlations with spinout performance, as measured by size, wage and growth rate. We also find that group experience of spinout founders prior to spinout formation has a positive correlation with spinout performance, though this effect is slightly weaker and smaller than those of spinout founder's earnings and industry experience. The effects of these three measures of human capital are mostly present after controlling for parent firm establishment fixed effects. We find some evidence that the size of parent firm establishments has a positive correlation with spinout performance, but this effect does not hold after controlling for parent firm fixed effects. Finally, we find that founder's earnings, industry experience, group experience and parent firm size are more important during the early stage of spinout formation.
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  • Working Paper

    ENFORCING COVENANTS NOT TO COMPETE: THE LIFE-CYCLE IMPACT ON NEW FIRMS

    June 2014

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-14-27

    We examine the impact of enforcing non-compete covenants (CNC) on the formation and performance of new firms using matched employer-employee data on 30 US states. To identify the impact of CNC, we exploit the inter-state variation in CNC enforcement along with the fact that courts do not enforce such covenants between law firms and departing lawyers in any state. Using a difference-in-difference-in-difference specification with law firms and firms that are not withinindustry spinouts as the baseline, we find states with stricter CNC enforcement have fewer, but larger within-industry spinouts that are more likely to survive their nascent years, and conditional on survival, grow faster during those years. These results are consistent with CNC enforcement having a selection effect on within-industry spinouts. Particularly, with stricter enforcement, only founders with higher-quality ideas and resources choose to overcome CNC-related barriers, which reduces entry rate but increases observed short-term performance of these spinouts.
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  • Working Paper

    NBER Patent Data-BR Bridge: User Guide and Technical Documentation

    October 2010

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-10-36

    This note provides details about the construction of the NBER Patent Data-BR concordance, and is intended for researchers planning to use this concordance. In addition to describing the matching process used to construct the concordance, this note provides a discussion of the benefits and limitations of this concordance.
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  • Working Paper

    What Happens When Firms Patent? New Evidence from U.S. Economic Census Data

    January 2008

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-08-03

    In this study, we present novel statistics on the patenting in US manufacturing and new evidence on the question of what happens when firms patent. We do so by creating a comprehensive firm-patent matched dataset that links the NBER patent data (covering the universe of patents) to firm data from the US Census Bureau (which covers the universe of all firms with paid employees). Our linked dataset covers more than 48,000 unique assignees (compared to about 4,100 assignees covered by the Compustat-NBER link), representing almost two-thirds of all non-individual, non-university, non-government assignees from 1975 to 1997. We use the data to present some basic but novel statistics on the role of patenting in US manufacturing, including strong evidence confirming the highly skewed nature of patenting activity. Next, we examine what happens when firms patent by looking at a large sample of first time patentees. We find that while there are significant cross-sectional differences in size and total factor productivity between patentee firms and non-patentee firms, changes in patentownership status within firms is associated with a contemporaneous and substantial increase in firm size, but little to no change in total factor productivity. This evidence suggests that patenting is associated with firm growth through new product innovations (firm scope) rather than through reduction in the cost of producing existing products (firm productivity). Consistent with this explanation, we find that when firms patent, there is a contemporaneous increase in the number of products that the firms produce. Estimates of (within-firm) elasticity of firm characteristics to patent stock confirm our results. Our findings are robust to alternative measures of size and productivity, and to various sample selection criteria.
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  • Working Paper

    Industry Learning Environments and the Heterogeneity of Firm Performance

    December 2006

    Working Paper Number:

    CES-06-29

    This paper characterizes inter-industry heterogeneity in rates of learning-by-doing and examines how industry learning rates are connected with firm performance. Using data from the Census Bureau and Compustat, we measure the industry learning rate as the coefficient on cumulative output in a production function. We find that learning rates vary considerably among industries and are higher in industries with greater R&D, advertising, and capital intensity. More importantly, we find that higher rates of learning are associated with wider dispersion of Tobin's q and profitability among firms in the industry. Together, these findings suggest that learning intensity represents an important characteristic of the industry environment.
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