Written work




When do high performers join startups? (job market paper)

Prior research offers contrasting views on when high performers are likely to join startups. On one hand, high performers face a higher opportunity cost of leaving wage work in early-stage startups encouraging later joining. On the other hand, high performers have higher upside in early-stage startups motivating them to join as early as possible. I resolve this tension by proposing that the stage of joining depends on personal liquidity constraints. I formalize my theory with a real options model and test it with contract-level data on the population of Finnish startups and their employees. I exploit a home property tax reform as exogenous variation in high performer personal liquidity constraints in a triple difference estimation and show that higher personal liquidity constraints lead high performers to join later stage startups. To probe the theorized mechanism, I further show how the relationship between high performer joining stage and personal liquidity constraints is moderated by the startup’s own pay constraints caused by universally binding collective bargaining agreements. Introducing the startup’s stage, this paper not only expands our understanding of whether high performers join startups or not but also when they join. Read more...


Human Resource Redeployability and Entrepreneurial Hiring Strategy: Evidence from Finnish Microdata (3rd round R&R, SMJ)

The timing of talent acquisition is a central decision for new ventures. On one hand, hiring after demand is proven minimizes losses. On the other hand, hiring before demand is proven allows new ventures to start developing unique capabilities. We resolve this tension by proposing that the timing depends on human resource redeployability. We test our theory with the population of Finnish ventures showing that portfolio entrepreneurs hire more employees early on because they have the option to redeploy them and that they hire employees with more transferable skills in order to benefit from the redeployment option. To probe our mechanisms, we examine how talent acquisition strategies in portfolio and standalone ventures vary with external conditions that reduce or amplify the benefits of redeployment. Read more...


A general interindustry relatedness index

This is my R code for the general interindustry relatedness index of Bryce and Winter (2009). The code can be just as well used to generate the time-variant relatedness index of Cetorelli, Jacobides and Stern (2021). In my research, to compute this measure I make use of Finnish Patent and Registration Office's data on Finnish corporate groups. The dataset shows all the corporate group links between limited liability companies in Finland reported in official annual accounts. Based on these links, I calculate the frequency of joint occurrence of all two-digit NACE Rev.2 pairs in a corporate group and apply the frequency scores to portfolio ventures in my venture dataset. To GitHub...