Elif Nisa Guler
3rd-Year Finance PhD Student
Kelley School of Business, Indiana University
Co-organizer & Fellow, Student-led Workshop on Entrepreneurial Finance and Innovation
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Research Interests: Private Markets, Entrepreneurial Finance, Innovation, and Corporate Finance more broadly.
Email: eguler@iu.edu | LinkedIn: @elifnisaguler
Working Papers
(* By coauthor, includes scheduled)
Presentations: Indiana University | TPRI Workshop* | E(astern)FA (2026) | SWFA* (2026) | Patent Conference 14* | SGE (2026) | MSI* (2026) | University of Warwick* | WEFI Fellows Conference (2026) | FMA European* (2026) | Private Capital Symposium* (2026) | ENTFIN* (2026)
We study how patent protection affects the allocation of startup financing. Using the Supreme Court's Bilski v. Kappos decision, which unexpectedly narrowed patent eligibility, we examine how venture capital (VC) investors respond to weaker property rights over innovation. Exploiting cross-industry variation in exposure to the ruling, we find that more exposed industries experienced larger increases in initial VC investment. This effect reflects capital reallocation: funding rises for startups without patents but falls for startups holding pre-Bilski patents. Our findings suggest that weaker patent protection can expand VC-backed entry and redirect capital toward startups previously disadvantaged by incumbent patents.
Presentations: Indiana University | NBER Entrepreneurship SI (2026)
I examine whether undergraduate entrepreneurship education increases business formation, exploiting the staggered introduction of entrepreneurship programs at over 150 U.S. universities. Using newly assembled data linking historical university catalogs to LinkedIn career histories for more than 300,000 graduates, I implement a within-university, adjacent-cohort difference-in-differences design. Program introductions reduce immediate business formation by 7.5 percent, with no effect on long-run entry or firm survival. Text-based classification via a large language model indicates the decline is driven by small-business entry, with no offsetting increase in growth-oriented entrepreneurship. These findings suggest university entrepreneurship education has limited effectiveness as a policy tool for stimulating new business creation or survival.
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