Seminar: Sascha Becker, University of Warwick.

Are Entrepreneurs Non-substitutable? Evidence from Nascent Firms.

We know little about what the most critical factors are for the growth and survival of nascent firms. In this paper we analyze the personal importance of the founder. How much does a nascent firm, after its inception, rely upon its founder? We provide causal evidence on this question by exploiting variation in founder death across firms in a unique dataset from Norway.