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
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.
- Can Entrepreneurship Be Taught? - Draft coming soon
Conventional wisdom offers no clear view on whether formal education encourages entrepreneurship. I study this question using the staggered introduction of undergraduate entrepreneurship degree programs at more than 100 U.S. colleges as a source of plausibly exogenous variation. I combine LinkedIn career histories with firm-level data to track graduates’ entrepreneurial entry. Within universities, students who major in entrepreneurship are about 5 percentage points more likely to start a business immediately after graduation and roughly 12 percentage points more likely to ever become entrepreneurs, confirming strong positive selection into these programs. Using a difference-in-differences design comparing adjacent cohorts within universities, I find that the introduction of an entrepreneurship major reduces short-run business formation by about 7.5 percent, or on average 2 fewer entrepreneurs per graduating class. This effect is entirely driven by declines in small-business entry, with no impact on growth-oriented, high-technology entrepreneurship. Rather than spurring more startups, formal entrepreneurship education seems to discourage marginal business entry.
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