HIDDEN POTENTIAL: THREE ESSAYS ON ENTREPRENEURIAL PRISON TRAINING

Entrepreneurship is often touted as one of the last remaining mechanisms to promote upward social mobility. Yet, many still debate whether these benefits accrue equally across members of society. One such group that needs upward mobility and could benefit from greater entrepreneurial opportunity is the incarcerated. Millions of individuals in the United States are incarcerated each year, which results in high rates of recidivism due to the significant social and economic challenges faced by these individuals. As evidenced by the many organizations seeking to reduce recidivism, helping those in prison to become productive members of society represents one of the “Grand Challenges” of our day. An innovative solution to this problem is the use of entrepreneurial training as inmates near their release dates. While anecdotal reports of the efficacy of these programs are encouraging, we still know little about how the currently incarcerated might be trained to become better entrepreneurs. In this dissertation, I aim to address a number of key questions around entrepreneurial prison training programs to understand what leads individuals to apply for the training, what factors influence completion of the training and then what is the impact of the training on graduates. Essay 1 aims to understand the influence that homophily and message framing have on motivation to complete entrepreneurial training by engaging in a series of randomized control trials within a leading training program. Essay 2 is a study of the antecedents to program entry and uses a randomized control trial to alter the type of entrepreneurial capital emphasized in a recruiting letter to understand which types of capital lead to the greatest application rate. Essay 3 uses a natural experiment that leverages accepted, but not trained inmates as a counterfactual to identify the impact that entrepreneurial prison training might have on recidivism. By combining methodological rigor with theoretical insights gathered from sociology, psychology, strategy and entrepreneurship, I seek to provide an example of an answer to the question: How can insights from strategy and entrepreneurship inform some of the biggest social issues of the day?Doctor of Philosoph