Geoffrey Borchhardt

I am a doctoral candidate in Organizations & Management at Yale School of Management. My research primarily centers on entrepreneurial careers, frequently within emerging markets or historical contexts, as well as innovation. I am passionate about understanding how spells in entrepreneurship affect people's income, future careers, and what drives the performance of their businesses. In other work, I explore how competitive environments influence the choice of organizational partnerships and future innovative performance. Throughout my research, I use econometric methods alongside novel data sources to reveal new elements of perennial questions and text-analysis methods to address novel questions with extant data.

I expect to graduate in 2024. Prior to my graduate studies at Yale, I received my B.Sc. in Business Administration and Sociology from Copenhagen Business School and M.Sc. in Sociology from the University of Oxford.

geoffrey.borchhardt@yale.edu
Curriculum Vitae

Selected Working Papers

[1] ''Who gets to experiment with entrepreneurship? Long-term earnings consequences of self-employment''
job market paper (new draft coming soon, updated abstract below)
▸ Open abstract

While recent research has focused on the long-term costs and benefits of a career in entrepreneurship, it has largely assumed that entrepreneurs enter from an origin of stable employment. Globally, the modal entrepreneur faces more precarious alternatives. I propose a theory that distinguishes entrepreneurs by the rigidity of the labor market for paid employment to assess long-term consequences of entering self-employment. This paper highlights future employers' commitment flexibility and the ease of venture growth as key mechanisms reconciling contrasting prior findings. Using high-frequency survey data from India, I find that entrepreneurs entering from precarious employment achieve higher and more stable earnings in entrepreneurship. Employers can also hire them with little commitment, facilitating frictionless returns to paid work and even transitions to higher-paying jobs for successful entrepreneurs. Formerly salaried entrepreneurs, on the other hand, face an institutional environment that makes building a growth startup costly and they struggle to return to salaried employment. This paper emphasizes the role of labor market mechanisms in governing long-term returns to entrepreneurship and extends theory to encompass the most common types of global entrepreneurship.

[2] ''Expertise, competitive overlap, and partner choice'' (with Balázs Kovács and Michelle Rogan)
▸ Open abstract

In market networks, firms regularly turn to other firms to supply expertise critical to their operations yet not held within the firm. When seeking expert partners, should firms avoid or select partners who also work with their competitors, i.e., have second order competitive overlap? Contrary to arguments in existing literature using a ''pipes'' view of relationships which predict the avoidance of partners serving competitors, we adopt a ''prisms'' view and argue that second order overlap serves as a signal of expertise, which positively affects partner choice under uncertainty. The signal effect is strongest when alter-centric uncertainty is highest - for new partners, nascent industries, and new technologies. We test our arguments for the effect of competitive overlap on expert partner choice in the context of patent law firm selection by inventing firms (i.e., clients), and we find robust evidence for our predictions. In an exploratory analysis, we also find that competitive overlap affects performance outcomes: patents handled by law firms with higher levels of competitive overlap take longer to get accepted but result in broader patents. The pattern of results suggests that firms that rely on competitive overlap as an expertise signal may reduce search costs without a net loss in performance.

We examine the returns to entrepreneurship in India. We find that entrepreneurs, on average, earn more than they would expect in paid employment. That positive effect holds for every subgroup of entrepreneurs, from the growth-oriented to the self-employed offering personal services. Further analysis reveals that this positive effect appears to stem almost entirely from the fact that entrepreneurs in India have more stable income streams, they have fewer months with no income. Only people in stable, salaried employment report comparable, or higher, earnings. Entrepreneurship may therefore represent a safer option for most people.