Research
My research examines how institutional environments — universities, industrial policy, export controls, AI, and platform design — shape who becomes a founder and what they build. Recent work centers on cross-border policy interventions and their downstream effects on entrepreneurship and venture capital.
U.S. export controls were meant to slow China's semiconductor sector. We find they increased VC funding to Chinese semiconductor startups by 6 percentage points and 12% in capital — driven by institutional reclassification, with state-backed investors acting as opportunity coordinators.
The Inflation Reduction Act selectively redirected venture capital toward climate-aligned technologies. Our Policy Credibility Index — scoring statutory specificity, durability, and enforceability — shows that institutional design quality, not just incentive size, determines whether private capital follows industrial policy.
China's local governments have deployed massive supply-side subsidies to attract battery manufacturers across 300 prefecture-level cities. The subsidies do attract more firms — but the marginal entrants are non-corporate, short-lived, generate no patents, and exit at elevated rates even in cities where the underlying battery cluster is thriving. Subsidies designed without capability screening attract participation without productive commitment.
For the full publication list, see Google Scholar.
- Ahmad, W., Sen, A., Eesley, C., Brynjolfsson, E. (2024). Companies inadvertently fund online misinformation despite consumer backlash. Nature, 630(8015), 123–131.
- Eesley, C., & Miller, W.F. (2018). Impact: Stanford University's economic impact via innovation and entrepreneurship. Foundations and Trends in Entrepreneurship, 14(2).
- Eesley, C., & Lee, Y.S. (2023). In Institutions We Trust? Trust in Government and the Allocation of Entrepreneurial Intentions. Organization Science, 34(2), 532–556.
- Lee, Y.S., & Eesley, C. (2021). Do University Entrepreneurship Programs Promote Entrepreneurship? Strategic Management Journal, 42(4), 833–861.
- Armanios, D., Eesley, C., Li, J., & Eisenhardt, K.M. (2017). How entrepreneurs leverage institutional intermediaries in emerging economies to acquire public resources. Strategic Management Journal, 38(7), 1373–1390.