Elif N. 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 Empirical Corporate Finance more broadly.
Email: eguler@iu.edu | LinkedIn: @elifnisaguler
Working Papers
(* By coauthor, includes scheduled)
Presentations: TPRI Workshop* | E(astern)FA (2026) | Indiana University | SWFA* (2026)
We study how patent protection affects venture capital (VC) investment in startups by exploiting the Bilski v. Kappos Supreme Court decision, which unexpectedly narrowed patent eligibility. Using variation in industry exposure to the ruling, we find that more exposed industries experienced larger increases in initial VC investment after the decision. The effect reflects a divergence in investment responses: exposure to Bilski is associated with more investment in startups without patents but less investment in startups with pre-Bilski patents. Our findings suggest that weaker patent protection lowers barriers to VC-backed entry and reallocates capital toward startups previously constrained by incumbent patents.
- Does Teaching Entrepreneurship Produce Entrepreneurs? - Draft coming soon
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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