Cohen, Lauren H.Malloy, Christopher J.Lerner, JoshLuo, Cheng2019-08-082018-052018-05-102018Luo, Cheng. 2018. Essays in Entrepreneurship and Financial Economics. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:41128477The chapters in this dissertation study entrepreneurship activity and capital market behavior. In Chapter 1, I ask whether the opportunity cost of marriage affects female entrepreneurship. I use World War II casualties as exogenous shocks to local marriage markets across the US and test whether women in high-casualty regions were more active in starting new businesses than women in low-casualty regions. In Chapter 2, I examine hedge funds' strategic behaviors at investment conferences. I evaluate performances of their stock pitches through event studies and analyze the behaviors and motives of various types of investors. In Chapter 3, my coauthors and I compare two asset pricing tests, the Fama-MacBeth cross-section test versus the Jensen's alpha time-series test. We study their relevance to a risk-averse investor facing transaction costs as well as their statistical power of detecting anomalies in capital markets.application/pdfenEntrepreneurshipFinanceThesis or Dissertation2019-08-08