Three Essays on Immigrant Entrepreneurship PDF Download

Author: Kaveh Moghaddam
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Businesspeople
Languages : en
Pages : 318

View

Book Description

Author: Joon Woo Hong
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Entrepreneurship
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
Despite significant interest in immigrant entrepreneurship, we still know relatively little about how ventures created by immigrant entrepreneurs differ from non-immigrant entrepreneurs. Prior research has tended to focus on immigrant entrepreneurs and derived insights without necessarily comparing them with non-immigrants. or use samples of the two that are not adequately matched. Because non-immigrant entrepreneurs are much larger in number and differently distributed across industries than immigrant entrepreneurs, we have underdeveloped notions about how the two types of entrepreneurs vary in their characteristics and achieve important venture outcomes. The purpose of this dissertation is to help address these problems in the literature, by going deeper into the theoretical mechanisms by which immigrant entrepreneurs choose to start entrepreneurial ventures and achieve innovative outcomes. In this dissertation, I examine several different issues relating to immigrant entrepreneurship. I consider how immigrant and non-immigrant entrepreneurs differ in terms of the innovativeness of the ventures they create, and why these differences exist. To do so, I highlight the role of liability of foreignness experienced by entrepreneurial firms. Liability of foreignness is a concept drawn from the international business literature that highlights how lack of knowledge, resources and legitimacy reduce the success of foreign firms in operating in a local environment. I suggest that immigrant entrepreneurs overcome liability of foreignness through greater reliance on knowledge drawn from their home environments, greater absorptive capacity in recombining new knowledge from the host country, and reliance on cultural norms that help them to overcome knowledge deficiencies. By investigating how immigrant entrepreneurs differ in their knowledge management and learning strategies compared to non-immigrant entrepreneurs, this dissertation advances our understanding of a new but key area of inquiry in the entrepreneurship field. The first essay of the dissertation examines differences in the innovation outcomes of new ventures started by immigrant and non-immigrant entrepreneurs. While immigrants are known to start entrepreneurial ventures at a higher proportional rate than their numbers in the population, particularly in high-tech sectors, little is known about how their ventures might differ in the innovations they produce relative to those of non-immigrants. I argue that, due to immigrant entrepreneurs’ ability to source knowledge not from just one but multiple institutional contexts, they develop a more extensive knowledge base with greater absorptive capacity. This higher absorptive capacity allows immigrant entrepreneurs to not only identify, make sense of and utilize a broader range of knowledge, but also come up with more knowledge recombinations, enhancing their innovation output relative to non-immigrant entrepreneurs. In addition, I suggest that the nature of knowledge and experiences gained in contexts outside of the United States can further enhance absorptive capacity, and in turn, the innovation outcomes of immigrants’ ventures. To test these arguments, I hand-collected a large sample of entrepreneurial ventures started by immigrant and non-immigrant entrepreneurs in the software industry. From this sample, I developed a sample in which immigrants’ ventures are matched in key characteristics to those of non-immigrants’ ventures. I find general support for my arguments relating immigrant entrepreneurs’ higher absorptive capacity with more innovative ventures. The second essay examines how ventures started by immigrant entrepreneurs might differ from those by non-immigrant entrepreneurs in the benefits they extract from strategic alliances. Given the expectation that immigrant entrepreneurs suffer from liability of foreignness, I suggest that they will have less ability to form strategic alliances compared to non-immigrant entrepreneurs, leading them to rely more on their own knowledge than on alliance partners. Among immigrant entrepreneurs, those with high entrepreneurial experience will rely less on alliance partners than those with low entrepreneurial experience. In addition, alliances relating to marketing rather than R&D are expected to offer more useful institutional and market-related knowledge to immigrant entrepreneurs that they typically lack. Partnerships with public rather than private firms are likewise expected to be more beneficial for immigrant entrepreneurs due to their ability to afford legitimacy and financial resources that they are unable to easily access elsewhere. Using a similarly matched sample of immigrant and non-immigrant entrepreneurs in the U.S. software industry as that used in the first essay, I find support for all of these arguments. The third essay examines the relative likelihood of entrepreneurial ventures created by immigrants and non-immigrants to fail (i.e., have lower survival rates). Given their liability of foreignness, ventures created by immigrant entrepreneurs may tend to fail more often than those by non-immigrant entrepreneurs. However, I suggest that immigrant entrepreneurs may be motivated to enact a stronger learning orientation to overcome their liability of foreignness. Such a learning orientation may facilitate their search and use of new knowledge, reducing the likelihood of venture failure. In this regard, I examine the role of national culture in affecting the learning orientation of immigrant entrepreneurs. I consider three dimensions of national culture that are likely to influence learning orientation: uncertainty avoidance, collectivism/individualism, and power distance. In particular, I suggest that entrepreneurs from higher uncertainty avoidance, more collectivist and higher power distance cultures will enact a stronger and more widespread search for knowledge and engage in more effective learning that reduces the likelihood of failure. I find partial support for my arguments. In all, the studies in this dissertation demonstrate considerable support for the notion that immigrant entrepreneurs develop more innovative ventures that tend to survive longer than those of non-immigrant entrepreneurs. By demonstrating these relationships in a single industry and using a matched sample of immigrant and non-immigrant ventures, these studies overcome deficiencies of prior studies that are unable to adequately pinpoint how immigrants might differ from non-immigrants in the types of ventures that they create.

Author: Alejandro Gutiérrez Li
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 135

View

Book Description
This dissertation comprises three essays related to the economics of entrepreneurship. Self-employment is a fundamental part of the labor market experiences of workers and is key to economic growth. The first two chapters analyze the relationship between entrepreneurship and immigration. Immigrant entrepreneurship has been growing in the United States, particularly in the last four decades. In Chapter 1, I study the role that pre-migration work experience of immigrants plays in their occupational choices and earnings in the US. In the second chapter of this work, I analyze the relationship between business ownership in Mexico and migration to the US. Mexico is the top source country of immigrants to the US, and a significant fraction of its labor force works in the self-employment sector. Chapter 3 investigates the role that family control plays in different measures of firm performance, CEO turnover, termination payments, and investments in research and development. Many entrepreneurial endeavors arise in families, and family firms are prevalent in both the US and the rest of the world. Immigrant entrepreneurship in the United States has grown steadily in the last forty years. In Chapter 1, I study the occupational choices of legal permanent residents in the US and their associated earnings in paid and self-employment. Making use of a unique data set with pre- and post-migration individual-level information, I analyze the role of home country work experience of immigrants in their probability of becoming entrepreneurs in the US and their earnings after migration. To control for endogenous sector selection in the estimation of earnings distributions, I follow a novel identification strategy based on extremal quantile regressions that does not require exclusion restrictions or a large support variable. I find that foreign work experience in paid and self-employment is an important predictor of entrepreneurship after migration. However, it has a limited impact on earnings which are instead influenced by human capital, assimilation, and demographic characteristics. Overall, my results highlight the role played by immigrants' labor market performance in their home countries to better understand their outcomes in the US. Mexico is one of the countries with the highest self-employment rates in the OECD. While most of the literature has analyzed the occupational choices of returning migrants, I study the relationship between business ownership and migration from Mexico to the United States in Chapter 2. Using longitudinal data from the Mexican Migration Project (MMP), I find that business owners in Mexico are less likely to move North, either legally or illegally. The results are robust after controlling for other factors that have been found to affect migration decisions like age, household characteristics, human capital, and networks. Although running a business could allow individuals to accumulate the necessary resources to finance a costly trip to the US, it also raises the opportunity costs of leaving the country and could increase the attachment and non-pecuniary benefits of staying at home. The findings highlight the role played by the type of occupation held in the home country to better understand the phenomenon of Mexico-US immigration. The last chapter of my dissertation (a joint project), Chapter 3, analyzes a central element associated with entrepreneurial decisions: families. Many companies start at the household level with more than one family member involved. In some cases, firms grow very big and continue in the family for subsequent generations. Using a unique hand-collected data set with information on the last two decades of the universe of public corporations in the US, we examine the role played by family-related CEOs in firms' financial performance, turnover practices, and R&D investments. We provide new evidence showing that firms with CEOs with family relations to other board members, and who have been working for a firm for longer periods of time, are less likely to be forced out of office relative to outsider CEOs. In contrast, we do not find differences in voluntary turnover between outsider and insider CEOs. We document that companies tend to appoint managers who were already working for the firm in another position and do not have family relationships within the organization. We find that managers with longer tenures achieve higher financial performance in the short run, invest less in R&D, and get paid less in case of an involuntary termination than outsider CEOs. Our results are consistent with the notion that family-related CEOs may face different incentives within a company compared to unrelated managers, which could affect firms' outcomes and the interests of minority shareholders.

Author: Carole Louise Cangioni
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Entrepreneurship
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description

Author: Aliaksei Kazlou
Publisher: Linköping University Electronic Press
ISBN: 917929989X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 102

View

Book Description
Immigrant entrepreneurs are known to be heterogeneous in terms of available resources and entrepreneurial outcomes. However, this heterogeneity, as well as immigrant entrepreneurs’ embeddedness in social networks and the institutional context of high-income welfare states such as Sweden, remains understudied. Sweden represents an interesting case as a popular immigration destination which liberalized its migration policy for entrepreneurs and changed other regulations, encouraging immigrant entrepreneurship after 2008. Theoretically, the dissertation contributes to the mixed embeddedness approach to immigrant entrepreneurship by considering three stages of the entrepreneurial process – entry, performance, and potential exit – in a changing institutional environment. Methodologically, the dissertation operationalizes the mixed embeddedness approach by studying these three stages – entry (propensity to start a business), performance (entrepreneurial incomes), and potential exit (duration in business) – among different categories of immigrants. Explanatory factors are drawn from three levels of analysis: institutional change (macro), social, ethnic and family networks (meso), and the individual’s human capital (micro). A range of statistical tools is used for empirical analyses: Difference-in-difference methods in combination with Coarsened Exact Matching and Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition are used to investigate the influence of institutional change on entrepreneurial entry and performance. Survival models based on Cox regression are applied to investigate the influence of social and family ties on the likelihood of entrepreneurial exit. A combination of clustering and association analysis allows heterogeneity to be approached via the categorization of immigrant entrepreneurs. Empirically, based on rich data from Swedish registers, the dissertation reveals that the propensity to start businesses in expanding ICT industries among labour immigrants was increased, and performance in terms of income among new immigrant entrepreneurs was improved after institutional change, compared to earlier. It also stresses that family networks mitigate a lack of other resources for refugee entrepreneurs, allowing them to stay in business longer. Two main categories of new immigrant entrepreneurs were distinguished in the overall heterogeneous population. The dissertation consists of four papers and an introductory chapter. Invandrarföretagare uppvisar stor heterogenitet när det gäller tillgängliga resurser och framgång i sitt företagande. Denna heterogenitet, liksom invandrarföretagens inbäddning i sociala nätverk och i den svenska välfärdsstatens institutionella kontext, är emellertid understuderad. Sverige utgör ett intressant fall eftersom det är ett land med relativt stor invandring som efter 2008 liberaliserade migrationspolitiken för företagare och på olika sätt uppmuntrade invandrares företagande. Teoretiskt bidrar avhandlingen till mixed embeddedness-perspektivet genom att analysera tre stadier i entreprenörsprocessen: uppstart, utveckling och eventuell avveckling, i förhållande till institutionell förändring. Mixed embeddedness operationaliseras i avhandlingen genom att olika kategorier invandrare studeras vid olika steg i entreprenörsprocessen; uppstart (benägenhet att starta ett företag), utveckling (företagarinkomster) samt eventuell avveckling (varaktighet i företaget) och genom att förklarande faktorer studeras på tre analysnivåer: institutionell förändring (makro), sociala, etniska och familjenätverk (meso) samt individens humankapital (mikro). En rad statistiska verktyg används för de empiriska analyserna; Difference-in-difference-metoder i kombination med Coarsened Exact Matching och Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition används för att undersöka hur institutionella förändringar påverkar uppstart och utveckling. Överlevnadsmodeller baserade på Cox-regression tillämpas för att undersöka hur sociala nätverk och familjeband påverkar sannolikheten för avveckling. Med en kombination av klusteranalys och associationsanalys undersöks mönster i heterogeniteten bland invandrarföretagarna genom kategorisering. Empiriskt, baserat på detaljerade data från svenska register, visar avhandlingen att benägenheten att starta verksamhet inom IKT-branschen ökade bland arbetskraftsinvandrare, samt att inkomsterna bland nya invandrarföretagare förbättrades efter en period av institutionell förändring. Avhandlingen visar även att familjenätverk motverkar bristen på andra resurser för företagare med flyktingbakgrund, vilket gör att de kan stanna i verksamheten längre. Två huvudkategorier går att urskilja i den heterogena gruppen av företagare. Avhandlingen är en sammanläggning av fyra artiklar och en inledande kappa.

Author: Astrid Marinoni
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
My dissertation is composed of three chapters that explore the relationships between entrepreneurship, innovation, and the broader economic and social dynamics that are shaping the modern world. In the area of entrepreneurship and innovation, one aspect that is often examined is that of the relationship between individuals and firms. In my work, I examine the role that social and economic factors play in shaping the environment within which entrepreneurs and innovators work and grow. The first chapter of the dissertation focuses on the impact of immigration on entrepreneurship and explores the consequences of start-up location on the number of immigrant-founded start-ups and their performance. I find that immigration has a positive effect on immigrant entrepreneurship only in non-enclave areas. Additional analyses uncovering the mechanism suggest that discrimination faced by immigrants in non-enclave areas might be the main driver for the increased entrepreneurship. In a second chapter on entrepreneurship, jointly authored with John Voorheis, we explore how entrepreneurship influences income inequality and social mobility in the United States. Shedding light on who gains from entrepreneurship is crucial to understanding whether investments in incubating potentially innovative start-up firms will produce socially beneficial outcomes. We find that entrepreneurship increases income inequality. Further, we find that this increase in income inequality arises because almost all the individual gains associated with increased entrepreneurship accrue to the top section of the income distribution. In the third chapter, joint with Michela Giorcelli and Nico Lacetera, we study the interplay between scientific progress and culture through text analysis on a corpus of about eight million books, with the use of machine learning techniques. We focus on a specific scientific breakthrough: the theory of evolution by Charles Darwin. Besides examining the diffusion of certain concepts that characterized this theory, we document their semantic changes over time. Our findings thus show a complex relationship between two key factors of long-term economic growth: science and culture. We argue that considering the evolution of these two factors jointly can offer new insights to the study of the determinants of economic development, and machine learning is a promising tool to explore these relationships.

Author: Rocío del Pilar Aliaga Isla
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 283

View

Book Description

Author: Jan Rath (Editor of this Special Issue)
Publisher: ACIDI, I.P.
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

View

Book Description
This Special Issue aims to provide an extensive mapping of policies in the promotion of ethnic entrepreneurship in a number of countries. It is motivated by the desire of national and municipal Governments to create an environment conducive to setting up and developing SMEs in general and immigrant businesses in particular. Furthermore it also highlights how the third sector has also had a crucial role in the reinforcement of immigrant entrepreneurship, and provides indications of how best to address this issue at a Governmental level in the future.

Author: Richard T. Herman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 047057030X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 276

View

Book Description
A provocative look at the remarkable contributions of high-skill immigrant entrepreneurs in America Both a revelation and a call-to-action, Immigrant, Inc. explores the uncommon skill and drive of America's new immigrants and their knack for innovation and entrepreneurship. From the techies who created icons of the new economy-Intel, Google, eBay and Sun Microsystems-to the young engineers tinkering with solar power and next-generation car batteries, immigrants have proven themselves to be America's competitive advantage. With a focus on legal immigrants and their odyssey from homeland to start-up, this unique book Explores the psyche, cultural nuances, skills, and business strategies that help immigrants achieve remarkable success Explains how immigrants will create the American jobs of the future-if we let them Whether you are a CEO, a civic leader, or an entrepreneur yourself, Immigrant, Inc. warns of the peril of anti-immigrant attitudes and a hostile immigration process. It also explains how any American can tap their "inner immigrant" to transform their lives and their companies. Written by an immigration lawyer who represents immigrant entrepreneurs and a journalist who specializes in international culture, the authors have a front-row seat to this phenomenon, offering a fascinating glimpse into the mindset of the most persistent entrepreneurs of the era.

Author: Cathy Yang Liu
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030503631
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276

View

Book Description
This book draws on evidence from global cities around the world and explores various dimensions of immigrant entrepreneurship and urban development. It provides a substantive contribution to the existing literature in several ways. First of all, it pursues a comparative approach, with case studies from both the global north and global south, so as to broaden the theoretical framework in this area especially as pertinent to emerging economies. Second, it covers multiple scales, from local community place-making, to urban contexts of reception, to transnational networks and connections. Third, it combines approaches and research methods from numerous disciplines, investigating entry dynamics, trends and patterns, business performance, challenges, and the impact of immigrant entrepreneurship in urban areas. Finally, it pays particular attention to current international experiences regarding urban policies on immigrant entrepreneurship. Given its scope, the book will be an enlightening read for anyone interested in immigration, entrepreneurship and urban development issues around the globe. As global cities around the world continue to attract both domestic migrants and international migrants to their bustling metropolises, immigrant entrepreneurship is emerging as an important urban phenomenon that calls for careful examination. From Chinatown in New York, to Silicon Valley in San Francisco, to Little Africa in Guangzhou, immigrant-owned businesses are not only changing the business landscape in their host communities, but also transforming the spatial, economic, social, and cultural dynamics of cities and regions.