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The Top 200 U.S. Startup Cities for 2020
The 200 top U.S. startup cities for venture capital (VC) investment for 2020 provide few surprises. The top four startup cities are the same for the third year in a row, and San Francisco holds on to its…
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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Become an affiliate and develop academic research using the wiki, or view hundreds of summaries of research articles and U.S. federal legislation.
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Discover thousands of pages of information about everything from our research computing infrastructure to the economics of true love.
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.
The Carried Interest Debate
In the 2016 election, carried interest and its taxation was a hot topic. Often explained as a “loophole” that allows the rich to exploit tax codes, carried interest is not a political issue that clearly fits within party lines. Lobbying by the financial sector occurs on both sides of the political aisle, and there are…
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…
Small Business and Overtime Regulation
Clocking in: Small Business and Overtime Regulation What is the New Overtime Regulation? On December 1, 2016, the Labor Department will officially institute new regulations on overtime eligibility for workers. Announced on May 17, the new rules require business owners to pay salary workers earning up to $47,476 a year time-and-a-half overtime pay when they work more…
Bureaucracy and Public Sector Innovation
The public benefits greatly when there are innovations in how our government approaches policymaking and regulation. However, sometimes barriers created by bureaucratic structures can slow implementation. When regulation and rigidity are holding us back, leaders are responsible for ensuring that our government institutions are allowing for change when our old ways of approaching challenges become…
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…