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Rutigliano, Valentina

University of British Columbia

Entrepreneurs' characteristics can have important impacts on their firms and workers. This dissertation studies two specific aspects related to firm ownership: the first is the intersection between the entrepreneur's private life (specifically, family formation) and firm outcomes; the second is the impact of the entrepreneur's wealth, and how this wealth is invested, on firms and employees. Chapter 2 studies the effect of childbirth on women's entrepreneurial activity. Women are less likely than men to start firms and female entrepreneurs are less likely to succeed, but the causes of the gender gap in entrepreneurship are still poorly understood. Drawing on rich administrative data from Canada and using an event study and instrumental variable design, I show that childbirth has substantial negative effects on women's founding rates and start-up performance, accounting for a large portion of the gender gap in entrepreneurship. The effects are permanent: entrepreneurial outcomes never recover to their pre-birth levels. In Chapter 3, I explore the mechanisms underlying the findings in the previous chapter. I examine whether the negative impacts on women's entrepreneurial outcomes after childbirth are driven by maternal preferences or by frictions like limited childcare options. Using data from Canada’s diverse immigrant population, I show that women from cultures with "traditional" gender norms experience larger declines in business performance post-childbirth. Next, I investigate household decision-making, showing that specialization within the household cannot fully explain the results: even women who were the family's breadwinner face significant performance penalties after childbirth. Finally, childcare support, particularly from grandparents, can mitigate these adverse effects, benefiting mothers' entrepreneurial firms. Chapter 4 studies the effect of entrepreneurs' portfolio diversification on their ability to protect workers against exogenous shocks hitting their firms. It finds that entrepreneurs with better diversified portfolios provide more insurance to employees against labor income risk: firms owned by more diversified entrepreneurs offer more stable jobs and earnings to employees when hit by shocks. The data are consistent with such insurance being partly provided to retain valuable human capital and partly to avoid costly terminations.

Text

2024-07-30

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88824

Business Administration - Finance

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/