Destaques

This paper shows that entrepreneurial human capital is a key driver of firm dynamics using administrative panel data on the universe of firms and workers in Portugal. Firms started by more educated entrepreneurs are larger at entry and exhibit higher growth throughout the life cycle. The differences are driven by productivity, are particularly strong in the upper tail of the distribution, and do not hold for more educated workers in general. In addition, they do not appear to be driven by omitted ability or selection. Combining these findings with cross-country data to calibrate a simple model of heterogeneous firms, I find that accounting for the effect of entrepreneurial human capital on firm-level productivity increases the fraction of cross-country income differences explained by human and physical capital from 40% to 65%-76%.

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