Score contribution per author:
α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count
New businesses are important for job creation and have contributed more than proportionally to the recent economic fluctuations. Given the risk exposure of entrepreneurs, this paper asks whether changing risk can explain the dynamics of new businesses. It makes two contributions. First, it provides a tractable, quantitative framework for analyzing business creation when entrants are exposed to idiosyncratic risk. Second, it provides conditions under which data on the size distribution of new businesses and their exit rates identifies entrepreneurial risk. According to the structural estimates, fluctuations in such risk explain around 40% of the employment fluctuations at new U.S. businesses.