Artificial Intelligence, Education, and Entrepreneurship
78 Pages Posted: 17 Sep 2019 Last revised: 4 Jan 2021
Date Written: October 26, 2020
Abstract
The scarcity of the human capital needed for R&D in Artificial Intelligence (AI) created an unprecedented brain drain of AI professors from universities in 2004-2018. We exploit this brain drain as a source of variation in students’ domain-specific knowledge and provide causal evidence that domain-specific knowledge is important for startup formation, seed funding, round A funding, and funding growth rate. The effect is the largest for top universities, PhD students, and startups in the area of deep learn- ing. These results contribute to the entrepreneurial finance literature and challenge the current view that entrepreneurs are jacks-of-all-trades, master of none (Lazear 2004).
Keywords: Artificial intelligence, entrepreneurial finance, human capital, innovation, education, deep learning
JEL Classification: L26, O33, O31, I23, J24
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