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 lacks consensus on the role of formal education in entrepreneurship. I exploit the staggered, locally exogenous introduction of entrepreneurship programs across over 100 U.S. colleges to address selection bias in a large-scale empirical setting. This design enables a causal assessment of how structured entrepreneurship education influences students’ decisions to pursue entrepreneurial careers and the types of ventures they start. By comparing adjacent cohorts within the same college before and after the program's introduction, I examine whether formal training shapes students into entrepreneurs, rather than entrepreneurial outcomes simply reflecting inherent traits.
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