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Aaron Chatterji

Mark Burgess & Lisa Benson-Burgess Distinguished Professor
Fuqua School of Business
A217 Fuqua School of Business, 90120, Durham, NC 27708

Selected Publications


The entrepreneurial process: Evidence from a nationally representative survey

Journal Article Strategic Management Journal · January 1, 2023 Research Summary: Scholars have traditionally characterized the variation in firm performance as determined by conditions after entry, where the entry decision is a one-shot binary choice determined by cost–benefit analysis. However, recent theoretical wor ... Full text Cite

Experimentation and Start-up Performance: Evidence from A/B Testing

Journal Article Management Science · September 1, 2022 Recent scholarship argues that experimentation should be the organizing principle for entrepreneurial strategy. Experimentation leads to organizational learning, which drives improvements in firm performance. We investigate this proposition by exploiting t ... Full text Cite

Categorical competition in the wake of crisis: Banks vs. credit unions

Journal Article Organization Science · July 1, 2021 We connect two distinct streams of research on categories to study the role of within-category typicality in the context of legitimacy shocks. We argue that, following a legitimacy shock, member organizations of the tainted, focal category suffer equally, ... Full text Cite

Choosing between growth and glory

Journal Article Management Science · May 1, 2020 Prior work has established that the financing environment can impact firm strategy. We argue that this influence can shape the earliest strategic choices of a new venture by creating a potential trade-off between two objectives: rapid growth and reaping th ... Full text Cite

Assessing the Impact of CEO Activism

Journal Article Organization and Environment · June 1, 2019 CEO activism refers to corporate leaders speaking out on social and environmental policy issues not directly related to their company’s core business, which distinguishes it from nonmarket strategy and traditional corporate social responsibility. In the fi ... Full text Cite

When does advice impact startup performance?

Journal Article Strategic Management Journal · March 1, 2019 Why do some entrepreneurs thrive while others fail? We explore whether the advice entrepreneurs receive about managing their employees influences their startup's performance. We conducted a randomized field experiment in India with 100 high-growth technolo ... Full text Cite

The limits of relational governance: Sales force strategies in the U.S. medical device industry

Journal Article Strategic Management Journal · January 1, 2019 Research Summary: We explore how interorganizational relationships shape firm boundary decisions. Using data on 545 U.S. medical device manufacturers' product portfolios and sales-governance choices (i.e., internal or external sales forces) from 1983 to 19 ... Full text Cite

School spirit: Legislator school ties and state funding for higher education

Journal Article Journal of Public Economics · August 1, 2018 We explore a new mechanism to understand state funding for public colleges and universities by leveraging data on the educational experiences of state legislators, specifically if and where they received postsecondary education. Using novel, hand-collected ... Full text Cite

Do investors actually value sustainability? New evidence from investor reactions to the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI)

Journal Article Strategic Management Journal · April 1, 2018 Research Summary: Research exploring investor reactions to sustainability has substantial empirical limitations, which we address with a large-scale longitudinal financial event study of the first global sustainability index, DJSI World. We examine investo ... Full text Cite

Innovation and American K-12 education

Journal Article Innovation Policy and the Economy · January 1, 2018 Economists have long believed education is essential to the acquisition of human capital and contributes to economic growth. However, education researchers, political and business leaders, and other stakeholders have raised concerns about the quality and c ... Full text Cite

THE NEW CEO ACTIVISTS A PLAYBOOK FOR POLARIZED POLITICAL TIMES

Journal Article HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW · January 1, 2018 Link to item Cite

The new CEO activists

Journal Article Harvard Business Review · January 1, 2018 Cite

A firm that shares a name with its founder earns higher profits

Journal Article Economist (United Kingdom) · August 19, 2017 Cite

Eponymous entrepreneurs

Journal Article American Economic Review · June 1, 2017 We demonstrate that eponymy-firms being named after their owners-is linked to superior firm performance, but is relatively uncommon (about 19 percent of firms in our data). We propose an explanation based on eponymy creating an association between the entr ... Full text Cite

Learning on the Job? Employee mobility in the asset management industry

Journal Article Management Science · October 1, 2016 We present a new mechanism by which prior employment can influence transitions to other firms. We propose that some employees divert effort toward unproductive activities to learn about their own fitness for alternative employment. Based on the results of ... Full text Cite

Do ratings of firms converge? Implications for managers, investors and strategy researchers

Journal Article Strategic Management Journal · August 1, 2016 Research summary: Raters of firms play an important role in assessing domains ranging from sustainability to corporate governance to best places to work. Managers, investors, and scholars increasingly rely on these ratings to make strategic decisions, inve ... Full text Cite

How open system intermediaries address institutional failures: The case of business incubators in emerging-market countries

Journal Article Academy of Management Journal · June 1, 2016 In emerging-market countries, commercial institutions do not always develop sufficiently quickly or effectively to support ambitious entrepreneurs. How might intermediaries remedy these problems? We address this question by drawing on institutional literat ... Full text Cite

Does the market for ideas influence the rate and direction of innovative activity? Evidence from the medical device industry

Journal Article Strategic Management Journal · March 1, 2016 Prior work argues that the "market for ideas" supports an open system of innovation, allowing for efficient development of technology across firms. Although this literature has described important features of this market, how it influences the rate and dir ... Full text Cite

Field experiments in strategy research

Journal Article Strategic Management Journal · January 1, 2016 Strategy research often aims to empirically establish a causal relationship between an independent variable and a dependent variable such as firm performance. For many important strategy research questions, however, traditional empirical techniques are not ... Full text Cite

Focus on Value

Chapter · January 1, 2015 Full text Cite

Dynamic capabilities and managing human capital

Conference Academy of Management Perspectives · November 1, 2014 We apply the dynamic capabilities framework to explore the management of human capital, with particular emphasis on the process of "acqui-hiring." Acqui-hiring is the acquisition of small companies primarily to gain access to their employees and has been p ... Full text Cite

Clusters of entrepreneurship and innovation

Journal Article Innovation Policy and the Economy · January 1, 2014 This paper reviews recent academic work on the spatial concentration of entrepreneurship and innovation in the United States. We discuss rationales for the agglomeration of these activities and the economic consequences of clusters. We identify and discuss ... Full text Cite

The impact of city contracting set-asides on black self-employment and employment

Journal Article Journal of Labor Economics · January 1, 2014 In the 1980s, many US cities initiated programs reserving a proportion of government contracts for minority-owned businesses. The staggered introduction of these set-aside programs is used to estimate their impacts on the self-employment and employment rat ... Full text Cite

Using users: When does external knowledge enhance corporate product innovation?

Journal Article Strategic Management Journal · January 1, 2014 Prior research on corporate innovation highlights the importance of accessing external knowledge from other firms and universities. However, survey evidence indicates that product users are perhaps the most important source of external knowledge. We build ... Full text Cite

An Analysis of U.S. Congressional Support for the Affordable Care Act

Journal Article Health Management Policy and Innovation · 2014 Cite

Learning on the job? Entrepreneurial spawning in the asset management industry

Conference Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings · January 1, 2014 Full text Cite

Robert H. Frank: The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good

Journal Article Administrative Science Quarterly · June 2013 Full text Cite

High-technology entrepreneurship in silicon valley

Journal Article Journal of Economics and Management Strategy · June 1, 2013 The economic expansion of the late 1990s created many opportunities for business creation in Silicon Valley, but the opportunity cost of starting a business was also high during this period because of the exceptionally tight labor market. A new measure of ... Full text Cite

Entrepreneurial finance, credit cards, and race

Journal Article Journal of Financial Economics · October 1, 2012 This paper examines the impact of financial deregulation on entrepreneurship. We assess the impact of credit card deregulation on transitions into self-employment using state-level removal of credit card interest rate ceilings following the US Supreme Cour ... Full text Cite

How do product users influence corporate invention?

Journal Article Organization Science · January 1, 2012 The extensive academic literature on innovation has long recognized product users as a potentially important source of ideas. Although prior work has primarily focused on understanding the unique motivations and knowledge that allow users to generate their ... Full text Cite

How firms respond to being rated

Journal Article Strategic Management Journal · September 1, 2010 While many rating systems seek to help buyers overcome information asymmetries when making purchasing decisions, we investigate how these ratings also influence the companies being rated. We hypothesize that ratings are particularly likely to spur response ... Full text Cite

How well do social ratings actually measure corporate social responsibility?

Journal Article Journal of Economics and Management Strategy · March 1, 2009 Ratings of corporations' environmental activities and capabilities influence billions of dollars of "socially responsible" investments as well as some consumers, activists, and potential employees. In one of the first studies to assess these ratings, we ex ... Full text Cite

Spawned with a silver spoon? Entrepreneurial performance and innovation in the medical device industry

Journal Article Strategic Management Journal · February 1, 2009 Entrepreneurs in high-technology industries often have prior experience at incumbent firms, but we know little about how knowledge obtained at the prior employer impacts entrepreneurial performance. Drawing on previous work from strategy, economics, and or ... Full text Cite

Scaling social entrepreneurial impact

Journal Article California Management Review · January 1, 2009 Successful scaling of social impact by a social entrepreneurial organization is driven by its capabilities in seven areas, identified in this article by using the acronym SCALERS: Staffing, Communicating, Alliance-building, Lobbying, Earnings-generation, R ... Full text Cite

High-Technology Entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley Opportunities and Opportunity Costs

Journal Article NET Institute Working Paper · September 2008 Cite

Understanding the 'Corporate' in Corporate Social Responsibility

Journal Article Harvard Law & Policy Review · 2008 Link to item Cite

A Comment on 'Corporate Social Responsibility and Workers' Rights'

Journal Article Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal · 2008 Cite

Physician-industry cooperation in the medical device industry.

Journal Article Health Aff (Millwood) · 2008 Anecdotal evidence suggests that innovative medical devices often arise from physicians' inventive activity, but no studies have documented the extent of such physician-engaged innovation. This paper uses patent data and the American Medical Association Ph ... Full text Link to item Cite

Breaking down the wall of codes: Evaluating non-financial performance measurement

Journal Article California Management Review · December 1, 2006 In some third-world factories there is a literal "wall of codes." Posted are dozens of codes of conduct as defined by dozens of customer, firm, and industry groups and a host of certifying organizations. The cost of this wall of codes is clear for managers ... Cite