Elif Nisa Guler
4th-Year Finance PhD Candidate
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 by exploiting the staggered introduction of entrepreneurship programs across more than 150 U.S. universities. I construct a novel hand-collected dataset combining historical university catalogs with LinkedIn career histories for over 300,000 graduates and implement a within-university, adjacent-cohort difference-in-differences design. Exposure to entrepreneurship education reduces immediate business formation by 10.7% compared to the prior cohort, driven entirely by fewer small businesses, with no effect on growth-oriented ventures, long-run entrepreneurial entry, or longer-run business continuation. The decline is stronger at public universities and among earlier program adopters, consistent with a screening mechanism. The findings suggest entrepreneurship education has limited effectiveness as a policy tool for stimulating new business creation.
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