|| Entrepreneurship & Family Business | Emerging Economies | Program Evaluation | Field Experiments ||

Why do so few women in poverty settings take the first step toward entrepreneurship, despite its potential to transform lives? My latest research (published in Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal) tackles this overlooked question by exploring what motivates women to sign up for micro-entrepreneurship training in poverty contexts where stable wage jobs are scarce and social barriers are high. Through a field experiment with rural women in India, I show how customized and relatable knowledge, conveyed through Founding Templates, can boost women’s confidence and willingness to pursue self-employment- especially when ‘templates’ highlight social support. This work sheds light on the critical pre-entry stage of entrepreneurship and offers actionable insights for designing programs that can expand economic opportunities for women in poverty contexts.

Why do some successful entrepreneurs give back to society?
https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.1572 This paper (published with Bala Vissa in Organization Science) explores when do India’s newly wealthy entrepreneurs—who have achieved lucrative exits—choose to engage in philanthropy after building their businesses. Using data on 673 entrepreneurs and rich qualitative insights, we show that an entrepreneur’s caste, gender, and elite educational background shape their drive to reinvest personal wealth into building organizations and ecosystems for social change. This study reveals how the personal backgrounds of “self-made” business founders influence whether they transform economic success into societal impact, opening up new questions about entrepreneurship’s role in social welfare.

Family-controlled Business Groups: An in-depth review and a Microfoundations-based research agenda https://doi.org/10.1177/01492063231180130 In this paper (published with Ravee Chittoor, Bala Vissa & Guoli Chen in Journal of Management), we synthesize extant FBG research and propose its reorientation toward a microfoundations-based approach. We develop a scheme for theoretical “taking” and “giving” of relevant microfoundational frameworks from contiguous management subfields to systematically identify potential paths ahead for future FBG theorizing. We granularly discuss illustrative microfoundation-based frameworks, outlining how their application could both enrich and better integrate FBG research with contiguous management subfields such as entrepreneurship, family business, and strategy research.