Essays on Entrepreneurial Choice and Non-Market Strategy

In this dissertation, I explore strategic choices and outcomes and what drives them at both the individual and firm levels. First, I introduce a new empirical setting for the study of entrepreneurship at the individual level. Next, the central study in the dissertation and posits that prospective entrepreneurs face a spectrum of entrepreneurial choices rather than a binary employment-entrepreneurship decision. Using novel panel data in an industry in which the individuals are all self-employed but some own businesses whereas others are more employee-like, I show that talent, risk attitudes and overconfidence predict selection into a rich set of entrepreneurial choices that vary by risk, autonomy and returns to talent. My results, which reveal both talent and risk interaction effects and differences in the effects between specialized and general talent, also shed light on the mixed empirical findings in prior research regarding the effect of talent and risk attitudes on entrepreneurship. These findings suggest that research over the last three decades that rely solely on a self-employment definition of entrepreneurship or on uni-dimensional drivers obscures complex choices and incompletely measures the determinants of entrepreneurial choice. The last essay investigates firm-level characteristics and their influence on strategic outcomes, particularly responses from the firms' external environment. Business operations of many firms, from apparel firms in the 1990s to Apple Inc. in this decade, have been disrupted due to anti-sweatshop activism. It has been argued that firms that have a record of recalcitrance may deter targeting by activists who consider a campaign against difficult targets too costly (Baron and Diermeier 2007). We use a unique database of anti-sweatshop targeting in the global apparel industry from 1990 to 2005 and indicators of recalcitrance or responsiveness in regards to domestic labor issues for the same period to test whether recalcitrance actually deters targeting. We find that firms that are recalcitrant in responding to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) citations draw the attention of anti-sweatshop campaigners, whereas responsive firms and those that work with domestic unions are no more likely to be targeted