Getting Schooled: The Role of Universities in Attracting Immigrant Entrepreneurs

Natee Amornsiripanitch, Paul Gompers, George Hu () and Kaushik Vasudevan ()
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Kaushik Vasudevan: https://business.purdue.edu/directory/bio.php?username=kvasude

No 22-19, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

Abstract: We study immigrant founders of venture-capital backed firms using a new and detailed data set that we assemble on the backgrounds of founders. Immigrant founders have been critical to the entrepreneurial ecosystem, accounting for roughly 20% of all venture capital-backed founders over the past 30 years. We document the channels through which immigrant founders arrive in the United States and how those channels have changed over time. Higher education has served as the primary entry channel for immigrant founders. The share of foreign-educated immigrant founders who initially arrive for work has decreased over time, while the share of immigrant founders with undergraduate education in the United States has increased over time. Immigrant founders are likely to start their companies in the state in which they were educated, leading to potentially large local economic benefits associated with attracting foreign students. The results of this paper have important policy implications for the supply of entrepreneurial talent and efforts to promote entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Keywords: entrepreneurship; venture capital; immigration; education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G24 J0 J15 J24 L23 L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51
Date: 2022-08-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des, nep-ent, nep-sbm and nep-ure
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Working Paper: Getting Schooled: The Role of Universities in Attracting Immigrant Entrepreneurs (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedpwp:94591

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DOI: 10.21799/frbp.wp.2022.19

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