We investigate the effect of parental leave taken by top management team (TMT) members on innovation outputs in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). By analyzing a large sample of Swedish SMEs, we find that the length of parental leave taken by TMT members has a positive effect on SME innovation outputs. This effect is stronger for smaller and longer-tenured TMTs, as these TMTs likely exhibit greater behavioral integration. Such integration can support TMT members in mitigating role conflicts and leveraging the role enhancement benefits connected to performing multiple roles during and after leave. These results contribute to the literature and offer valuable practical insights.

Research Summary: Prior research has examined whether individuals earn greater returns in entrepreneurship than in wage work but has paid little attention to gender differences in these returns. Using Swedish employee–employer data from 1990 to 2020, we compare individuals' earnings before and after they transitioned to entrepreneurship. We find that women founders earn less than men, yet this gap is smaller than in wage employment. Additionally, entrepreneurship yields disproportionately greater returns for (a) high-ability women facing glass ceilings in salaried positions, and (b) women in male-typed industries who encounter greater barriers to advancement in wage work. Together, these findings show that entrepreneurship can enable women to realize greater returns to their human capital, particularly when they face stronger constraints in paid employment.

Managerial Summary: This study examines whether entrepreneurship widens or narrows the gender earnings gap compared to wage work. Using comprehensive Swedish data that track individuals before and after founding new businesses, we show that, although women founders earn less than men in absolute terms, they experience substantially larger earnings gains than men when moving from wage work to entrepreneurship. This advantage is most pronounced for high-ability women and for women in male-dominated industries, who face stronger barriers to advancement in salaried work. Our findings indicate that entrepreneurship offers women a pathway to realize greater returns to their skills and experience, yielding disproportionately higher earnings compared to remaining in salaried jobs. For organizations, these results highlight how structural constraints in wage employment can push talented women toward entrepreneurship. 

In this paper, we investigate how the lockdown-induced exposure to remote work affected the likelihood of switching to longer commutes using a longitudinal full-population register of Swedish employees. We find that employees with little experience of longer commutes were more likely to start commuting longer if they had occupations with high potential for remote work. Examining heterogeneity across sectors, this is especially evident among high-skilled workers in sectors with low pre-existing shares of remote work and longer commutes. Our findings are important for understanding regional expansion and spatial extensions of labour markets in a world where more work can be done remotely.

Research shows that next-generation engagement in the family business is important for the business's long-term survival. However, the literature has neglected how differences among children could explain their career choices in the family business. We address this gap by drawing on birth order theory to examine differences in three career choices of the next-generation: joining the family business, holding a managerial position, and leaving the family business. Using a sample from Sweden, we employ family-stratified hazard models and show that later-borns are more likely to join the family business as their initial career choice compared to earlier-born siblings. However, when the next-generation joins the family business, later-borns are less likely to hold managerial positions in the family business and more likely to leave the family business. We conduct several mechanism tests explaining our hypotheses and run additional robustness tests to support our results. This study advances the research on next-generation engagement in family firms.

New ventures are expected to continuously add new jobs and managerial positions to meet the expanding demands of scaling. However, the rapid pace and inherent uncertainty of scaling often lead founders of new ventures to rely on heuristics when making these critical hiring and managerial appointment decisions. By integrating research on scaling, cognition in decision-making, and gender stereotypes with literature on HR practices, we argue that such heuristics can exacerbate reliance on gender stereotypes rather than the actual competencies of potential candidates. Using matched employer-employee census data covering all new ventures established and led by solo male founders in Sweden between 2004 and 2018, we find that scaling decreases the likelihood of hiring females for job positions and appointing females to managerial positions. However, the founder's HR education mitigates these negative effects on both female hiring and managerial appointments, while the founder's HR experience only mitigates the negative effects on female hiring decisions. We also tease out the invoked mechanisms, conduct post hoc tests, and run an extensive number of robustness tests.

Professors Albert N. Link and Donald S. Siegel are the joint recipients of the 2026 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research. Over several decades, their scholarship has fundamentally reshaped our understanding of how technology transfer, public policy, and institutional design influence entrepreneurial activity. Drawing on rigorous economic theory and quantitative methods, often combined with insights from management and public administration, they have established technology transfer as a core domain within entrepreneurship research. Their work demonstrates how universities, public research organizations, and government programs-most notably those shaped by the Bayh-Dole Act and the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program-affect entrepreneurial entry, innovation, and growth. By shifting attention beyond the individual entrepreneur and firm to the surrounding institutional and policy environment, Link and Siegel broadened the analytical scope of the field and provided a foundation for evidence-based entrepreneurship policy. In parallel, their leadership in building scholarly communities, journals, and research networks has been instrumental in consolidating technology transfer and public sector entrepreneurship as vibrant research areas. Collectively, their contributions have advanced theory, informed policy design, and influenced practice, thereby leaving a lasting imprint on entrepreneurship research and its societal relevance.

With the increasingly egalitarian division of childcare responsibilities in couples, we are seeing more and more male entrepreneurs who wish to be involved fathers yet face difficulties in jointly managing high demands in both their business and family domains when transitioning into parenthood. Intriguingly, this trend has given rise to a new phenomenon of overwhelmed “dadpreneurs” who seemingly struggle with transitioning into parenthood even more than female entrepreneurs, despite still assuming less childcare responsibilities than their female counterparts. We abductively probe potential explanations for this anomaly using longitudinal Swedish register data covering the period of 2008 to 2020. Applying a quasi-experimental event study setup with stacked difference-in-difference analyses, our findings suggest that the transition into parenthood has more negative effects on male than female entrepreneurs’ new venture performance once they assume comparable childcare responsibilities. Findings from abductive analyses are thereby consistent with the notion that female entrepreneurs are more effective and skilled in juggling work and family responsibilities, and that these superior juggling skills are acquired through gender socialization. To succeed in entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs may thus no longer only need to be Jacks/Jills-of-all-trades within the business, but across all domains of their life. 

This study contributes to the growing body of research on the relationship between founders' age and new venture performance, addressing existing gaps regarding founders approaching or surpassing retirement age. By analyzing comprehensive Swedish administrative data covering all newly incorporated firms and their founders, we first document an inverse U-shaped relationship between founders' age at founding and firm survival, as well as between founders' aging and employment growth. However, our findings reveal significant disruptions in these patterns between ages 60 and 70. Specifically, the relationship between founders' age at founding and firm survival temporarily improves at the conventional retirement age of 65, transitioning into a more nuanced, bimodal M-shaped pattern. In contrast, the relationship between founders' aging and employment growth plateaus around age 65. Using abductive analysis and a regression discontinuity design, we show that the increased firm survival observed after age 65 is influenced by a different selection of entrepreneurs, as individuals with enhanced financial security from pension access, along with previous industry experience and high levels of education, are more likely to start businesses at this stage.

To disentangle the complexities of business scaling, this chapter systematically reviews existing literature to differentiate scaling from traditional notions of high growth, focusing on strategic, operational, and environmental considerations. We identify dominant themes in the literature and highlight how scaling involves more than expanding operations, requiring a deliberate approach to resource allocation, market adaptation, and sustainable practices—in other words, a scaling orientation. By exploring various high-growth and scaling strategies, this chapter offers insights into the prerequisites for successful scaling, including the ability to navigate the challenges of digital transformation and internationalization. Based on the review conducted, we emphasize the necessity of treating scaling as a comprehensive, dynamic process that is influenced by a broad range of factors. The findings contribute to the literature on business scaling by outlining a foundation for future research and practice in fostering growth that is both impactful and responsible. 

This study investigates whether and how female directors influence the performance of male-led new ventures. Guided by resource dependence theory, which sees boards as providers of key resources and advice, we shift the focus adopted in prior research on female directors' strategic roles in public firms to argue that, in male-led new ventures, their influence is more operationally focused. Using data from Sweden and an instrumental variable approach that exploits the random assignment of a child's sex at birth among male founders, we find that greater female board representation is positively associated with the performance of male-led new ventures. Further analyses suggest this effect operates primarily through workforce development—namely, the hiring of skilled female employees and the provision of competitive compensation. Notably, even a single female director has a measurable impact. This study underscores the distinct role of female directors in entrepreneurial settings as opposed to established firms, illuminating the mechanisms through which female presence in the boardroom positively affects the early life stages of organizations. We hope our research serves as a basis for future research to explore further the roles played by female directors that are particularly relevant at the startup stage.