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A Solution to Vermont’s Declining Economy
Small, Dwindling, and Dead Last Vermont has pockets of prosperous haves in amongst fields of withering have-nots. Overall, though, the state’s economy has foundered for a long time. If you order America’s states on almost any economic measure,…
Welcome to the Economics of Growth, a collection of articles about economic, corporate, and personal growth written by Ed Egan.
Ed is an applied micro-economist conducting research in business economics, finance, and public policy. Much of his work leverages big data analytics and machine learning to understand important drivers of economic growth, including high-growth high-tech startups and markets for intellectual property.
Prior to academia, Ed was a serial fintech entrepreneur and worked for a cross-border venture capital fund focused on enterprise software.
Ed did his Ph.D. at the Haas School of Business, U.C. Berkeley, before being appointed the Innovation Policy Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He subsequently held faculty positions at Imperial College Business School and Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, where he developed new entrepreneurship curricula.
From 2015 to 2018, Ed was a fellow of Rice University’s Baker Institute and the founding director of its McNair Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. This site also provides an archive for more than 50 articles written by the McNair Center’s students and staff.
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The other side of this website hosts a Semantic MediaWiki-based collaboration platform, which provides a development environment, documentation, and content, for economic research. Previous incarnations of this wiki supported my colleagues at U.C. Berkeley, the NBER patent data project, the McNair Center, the Kauffman Incubator Project, and research done by some affiliated economists. It is now (largely) open to the public, and may be of interest to economists, other social scientists, computer scientists, and data scientists, as well as some finance professionals. It has almost 3,000 pages of content, developed by about a hundred team members, including the background material for many of the articles archived on this site.
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McNair Center Articles
This section features some of the best articles written by students at the McNair Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Rice University’s Baker Institute. This site archives the full collection of McNair Center articles for future generations of entrepreneurship and innovation policy researchers.
MassChallenge: Connecting Startups and Big Business
Corporations and startups are moving toward early stage interactions. MassChallenge, a highly successful nonprofit accelerator, has been connecting corporations and startups since its 2010 launch in Boston. MC has several US and international locations, which accelerated 372 startups in 2016. MC delivers positive results and has been listed among the Best Startup Accelerators by the Seed Accelerator Rankings Project, led by…
Big Problems for Small Practices
Big Problems for Small Practices: Examining the Effect of the Affordable Care Act on Entrepreneurship in the Healthcare Field The doctor-patient relationship is an important aspect of healthcare. Small physician practices, offices with no more than a couple doctors, have been the long-standing foundation of this relationship. Unfortunately, legislative changes disincentivize doctors from being small…
The Right to Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship and human rights are not frequently mentioned in the same conversation in the United States. However, in international policy, human rights and entrepreneurship are linked by many common policy goals, including enforcing the rule of law, improving infrastructure and fighting corruption. Rights necessary to pursue entrepreneurial endeavors–like the right to participate in the economy, the rights to…
Congress Turns Its Attention to Entrepreneurship and Innovation—But Does It Take Effective Action?
Legislation passed during the first three months of the 115th Congress pays disproportionate attention to entrepreneurship and innovation. McNair Center research shows that in a typical congressional session, less than 2 percent of legislation introduced is relevant to E&I issues. As of March 23, three of the ten bills that have become law during the 115th Congress directly address entrepreneurship and…
Gateway to Entrepreneurship: St. Louis
You probably know St. Louis as the Gateway to the West, but the city is emerging as a strong entrepreneurial ecosystem. For decades, St. Louis followed the economic development model of attracting and keeping large out-of-town companies with generous tax breaks and subsidies. In the 1990’s, political and business leaders became frustrated with the slow…