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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.
Reducing Recidivism through Entrepreneurship
Reducing Recidivism through Entrepreneurship High rates of recidivism in the United States negatively affect prisons, inmates, the government and tax-paying citizens. In 2013, the U.S. imprisoned 2,220,300 people. A Bureau of Justice Statistics study found that within three years of release, 67.8% of released prisoners were rearrested. Within five years, 76.6% of released prisoners were…
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…
Silicon Valley: A Powerhouse for Innovation
Silicon Valley’s economy is a powerhouse. Representing 14% of U.S. Gross Domestic Product, if California were a country, it would have the sixth biggest economy in the world. Although it has remained successful for decades, California was not always the leader that it is today. What about California led it to become a high-tech phenomena?…
Entrepreneurship for All: Washington D.C.
Washington, D.C. is known for its politicians and bureaucrats, but it’s also where the top-20 U.S. government contractors are based. In recent decades, high-tech, high-growth entrepreneurship has been on the rise in the U.S. capital. Startup ventures, coupled with a diverse economy, largely fueled by the federal government, have led D.C. to emerge as a strong entrepreneurial ecosystem. History of…
Women in STEM: Closing the Gap
Economists around the world emphasize the benefits of integrating more women into the workforce. While we are seeing slow growth in women’s presence in many sectors, the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields at the core of innovation seem to be especially lacking in girl power. In 2014, women comprised approximately 47 percent of…