Prescribed topic for the trial lecture:

How does human capital affect firm strategy and innovative activity?

Trial lecture:

Monday 27 April 09:00 Zoom video conference, NHH

Title of the thesis:

Human Capital and New Firm Performance: Founders, Employees and Board Members

Summary:

In his first article entitled “Do Board Members Matter? The Case of Entrepreneurial Firms”, Pandey explores the effect of board members on the performance of entrepreneurial firms. Using Norwegian micro-data, he identifies whether the death of a board member has negative performance effects. Further, he explores how different characteristics of the deceased board member affects the size of the performance effect. This approach addresses the most challenging methodological issues faced by studies of similar research questions in the past. He finds that board members do matter for entrepreneurial firm performance, but not unconditionally. New firms suffer most when they lose board members with high human capital (compared to those with lower human capital), or inside board members (compared to outside board members), or the chairperson of the board (compared to ordinary board members).

In his second article, Pandey explores three related questions: (1) Do immigrant entrepreneurs perform better or worse compared to native entrepreneurs? (2) Does the presence of native board members in such immigrant owned firms affect the performance gap between immigrant and native entrepreneurs?, and (3) Which characteristics of native board members make them more valuable for immigrant entrepreneurs? He finds that immigrant entrepreneurs, in general, exhibit a lower level of performance compared to native entrepreneurs. The gap is lower if the immigrant entrepreneur has lived in the host country for a long time, and if the immigrant entrepreneur has high human capital. He also finds that immigrant entrepreneurs outperform native entrepreneurs when they have native board members outside their family, or native board members with industry experience.

The third article studies the accumulation of human capital in new firms. It focuses on how the human capital of the first and second employees are related. His findings reveal that there is a positive relationship between the first and second employee human capital, even after controlling for the human capital of the founder. The relationship becomes weaker as the human capital of the founder increases. Furthermore, the relationship is stronger if the first and second employees share occupational background. The findings imply that early hiring in an entrepreneurial firm creates path-dependencies affecting future human capital accumulation.

Defense:

Tuesday 28 April, 16:00 Zoom video conference, NHH

Members of the evaluation committee:

Associate Professor Tina Saebi (leader of the committee), Department of strategy and management, NHH

Professor Michael Dahl, Aarhus University

Professor Robert Wuebker, University of Utah

Supervisors:

Professor Lasse Lien (main supervisor), Department of strategy and management

Professor Bram Timmermans, Department of strategy and management

Professor II Peter Klein, Department of strategy and management



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