Research

Community Social Capital and Small Business Advising
Collaborators: Inara Tareque PhD '25 and Professor Dan Wang

Using data from the New York State Small Business Development Center (SBDC), Inara Tareque PhD '25 and Professor Wang tracked over 110,000 small businesses between 2005 and 2022 that received formal advice from consultations with the SBDC during the same period. They found that more time spent with an SBDC consultant leads to greater rates of 1) startup progress, i.e., the likelihood of an entrepreneur proceeding to start a company, and 2) subsequent growth. However, the benefit is contingent on the concentration of internal and external social capital within the small business’s local community. Both a higher density of social connections within a small business’s community and more ties to other communities trigger the positive effect of an SBDC consultation on the small business’s progress and growth. Bringing together the literatures on regional social networks, community embeddedness, and entrepreneurship, they contribute by explicating the relationship between place-based social capital and knowledge capital on the growth of small businesses.

Working paper available*

Undocumented Immigrant Entrepreneurship
Collaborators: Sandra Portocarrero PhD '22; Iliana Perez, Executive Director of Immigrants Rising and Lecturer at UCLA; and Professor Dan Wang

Undocumented entrepreneurs, that is, foreign-born people who do not possess a valid visa or other immigration documentation and who engage in entrepreneurial activities, have a fundamentally different experience from what the literature on entrepreneurship currently offers us. Working with data from an immigrant advocacy organization, our initial findings from interviews reveal that because of discrimination in the labor market due to lack of legal status, entrepreneurial activity has become a viable alternative to employment, allowing undocumented business owners to contribute billions of dollars a year to the United States. Additional quantitative analysis of a seed grant program for undocumented immigrants to start their own businesses suggests that — compared to other immigrant status groups — undocumented entrepreneurs are more likely to re-invest in their own growth and generate greater returns on investment.

Data analysis in progress*

The Effect of Social Activism on Mission Drift Among Social Ventures
Collaborators: Sophie Cho PhD '23 (starting as Assistant Professor of Management at UCL)

With data on 600 hybrid social ventures from Glassdoor and Crunchbase, Sophie examines whether mega-threats from large-scale social movement protests influence the hybridity of social ventures. As social ventures grow, it becomes challenging to keep employees on board with hybridity — working in alignment with both social and economic values in the workplace — where they struggle to follow a social mission and pursue commercial activities simultaneously. The main proposition of this research is that the emergence of mega-threats caused by large-scale Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement protests is likely to make employees navigate hybridity better, particularly in social ventures that are built to advance diversity-related causes.

Working paper available*

Financial Access, Entrepreneurship, and Neighborhood Racial Inequality
Collaborators: Associate Professor Jorge Guzman and Professor Mario Small (Columbia University)

Professors Guzman and Small examine the relationship between local entrepreneurship, financial access, and neighborhood racial inequality. Neighborhoods differ in how much entrepreneurship they stimulate. And local entrepreneurship is known to have positive impacts on neighborhoods — such firms generate more local externalities, particularly jobs, than large-scale or external companies. The relationship between entrepreneurship and neighborhoods is mediated by access to financial and social institutions: Entrepreneurship depends on the availability of local financial and social resources to develop firms, and successful entrepreneurship in turn supports the development of local organizational capacity. Their agenda focuses on three initial questions: How does organizational capacity in neighborhoods contribute to entrepreneurship?; How much do neighborhood conditions matter after COVID-19, given the rise of online services and work-from-home?; And how do people under liquidity constraints relate to local financial institutions to get cash, and actively participate in neighborhood activity?

Data analysis in progress*

Entrepreneurial Narrative and Audience Perception: How Marginalized Entrepreneurs Construct Their Venture Narratives and its Effects on Investor Evaluation
Collaborators: Yixi Chen PhD '26

Yixi studies a sample of 200 founders from an impact-focused venture accelerator to explore the intersection of marginalized founder identities and venture narratives within entrepreneurship. Despite extensive scholarly attention to venture narratives as conduits for resources and legitimacy, little is understood about how entrepreneurs from marginalized backgrounds negotiate their identities in creating these narratives. Drawing on stigma theory, the research examines the strategic choices these entrepreneurs make in emphasizing or concealing their marginalized identities and the conditions under which these choices occur. They also investigate the impact of different narrative frames on audience evaluations, specifically when narratives incorporate elements of a marginalized identity. The research thus contributes new insights into the entrepreneurship literature on marginalized identities, narrative framing, and audience perception, and carries implications for fostering more inclusive practices in entrepreneurship ecosystems.

Data collection in progress*