Toward a greater economic understanding of entrepreneurial activity: Examining the nature and importance of specialized knowledge.

摘要

Since the days of Schumpeter, Knight and even Adam Smith, entrepreneurial activity has been understood to play a role in economic progress, both at the micro and macro level. However, there has been a long-standing challenge in applying economic thinking to entrepreneurial activity. In this dissertation, I maintain that entrepreneurial activity occurs by way of specialized knowledge. We can think of specialized knowledge as being created and advanced through the division of labor, and can call this process the division of knowledge. I introduce an analytical framework in which entrepreneurial activity is characterized by specialized knowledge resources coming together in team production. However, the model predicts that entrepreneurial transactions can fail to occur due to differences in the very specialized knowledge components necessary for entrepreneurial team production, or due to a lack of confidence between potential team members with respect to each other's specialized knowledge. As a result, we can expect that valuable entrepreneurial activity will experience a market failure in the absence of proper mechanisms for the retention, motivation, metering and monitoring of specialized knowledge. Empirically, I test the notion of relevant entrepreneurial transactions failing to occur when there are greater degrees of specialized knowledge present, as compared to general knowledge, and find substantial supporting evidence. Using regression analyses, I find that in initial public offerings (IPOs), the additional transaction of early private investors selling their shares (secondary shares) to public investors in the IPO is significantly less likely to occur, or occurs in lesser amounts, when there are greater degrees of specialized knowledge required in the underlying business activity. Key early private investors, including the founders, are limited by the marketplace in their ability to “sell out” and instead are required to stay more fully invested in their role as motivated participants in the entrepreneurial activity, when greater degrees of specialized knowledge are more important. The dissertation concludes by suggesting a foundation of time-tested economic literature as the basis for the future economic study of entrepreneurial activity, with the division of knowledge as an underlying economic principle.