Publications

April 2024
Case

Farcaster

By: Scott Duke Kominers, Shai Bernstein and Liang Wu

April 2024 (Revised August 2024)
Case

The Israeli Innovation Authority: Decision-making in a Time of Uncertainty

By: Shai Bernstein, Sabrina Howell and Josh Lerner

March 2024
Article

Flight to Safety: How Economic Downturns Affect Talent Flows to Startups

By: Shai Bernstein, Richard Townsend and Ting Xu

Using proprietary data from AngelList Talent, we study how individuals’ job search and application behavior changed during the COVID-19 downturn. We find that job seekers shifted their searches toward more established firms and away from early-stage startups, even... View Details

Keywords: Startup Labor Market; Flight To Safety; COVID-19; Recession; Job Search; Behavior

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February 2024
Teaching Note

TimeCredit

By: Emanuele Colonnelli, Raymond Kluender and Shai Benjamin Bernstein

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 824-139. TimeCredit is an artificial intelligence (AI) startup that is developing large language models (LLMs) to generate accounting memos. The case follows Ndonga Sagnia, a Gambian Harvard Business School MBA student with an accounting... View Details

Keywords: Accounting; Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Financing and Loans; AI and Machine Learning; Entrepreneurial Finance; Identity; Partners and Partnerships; Technology Industry

February 2024 (Revised September 2024)
Case

TimeCredit

By: Emanuele Colonnelli, Raymond Kluender and Shai Benjamin Bernstein

TimeCredit is an artificial intelligence (AI) startup that is developing large language models (LLMs) to generate accounting memos. The case follows Ndonga Sagnia, a Gambian Harvard Business School MBA student with an accounting background, as she decides how much... View Details

Keywords: Accounting; Business Startups; Entrepreneurship; Financing and Loans; AI and Machine Learning; Entrepreneurial Finance; Identity; Technology Industry

February 2024
Case

Chime Solutions

By: Shai Bernstein, William R. Kerr, Christopher Stanton, Raymond Kluender and Mel Martin

Just two years after launching its 10k by 2020 initiative to hire 10,000 employees by 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced Chief Executive Officer Mark Wilson to send nearly all of his staff at Chime Solutions (Chime) to work from home. Chime was a customer contact firm... View Details

Keywords: Working Capital; Service Operations; Recruitment; Performance; Change Management; Retention; Financial Institutions; Employee Relationship Management; Talent and Talent Management; Growth Management; Mission and Purpose; Communications Industry; Service Industry; United States

2023
Working Paper

Life After Death: A Field Experiment with Small Businesses on Information Frictions, Stigma, and Bankruptcy

By: Shai Benjamin Bernstein, Emanuele Colonnelli, Mitchell Hoffman and Benjamin Iverson

In a randomized control trial (RCT) with U.S. small businesses, we document that a large share of firms are not well-informed about bankruptcy. Many assume that bankruptcy necessarily entails the death of a business and do not know about Chapter 11 bankruptcy, where... View Details

Keywords: Small Business; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Knowledge Dissemination; Outcome or Result

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December 7, 2022
Article

Why Decentralized Crypto Platforms Are Weathering the Crash

By: Shai Bernstein and Scott Duke Kominers

In the past year, crypto markets dropped from $2.9 trillion in value to around $800 billion. In the wake of the collapse, crypto lenders and exchanges have been accused of fraud and other wrongdoing. What went wrong? One factor is competition. In theory, competition... View Details

Keywords: Crypto Economy; Cryptocurrency; Financial Complexity; Financial Crisis; Decentralization; Decentralized Markets; Decentralized Autonomous Organizations; Finance; Market Design; Financial Services Industry

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December 2022 (Revised August 2023)
Case

Ribbit Capital and the Gauntlet Investment Opportunity

By: Shai Bernstein and Allison M. Ciechanover

Ten-year-old, Palo Alto-based Ribbit Capital is best-known for its global investments in fintech. The firm was also an early advocate of crypto and blockchain, having invested in more than two dozen startups in the space in the past decade. In the Spring of 2022,... View Details

Keywords: Alternative Assets; Cryptocurrency; Business Startups; Investment Portfolio; Decision Choices and Conditions; Negotiation Deal; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Venture Capital; Financial Services Industry; California

2021
Working Paper

The Contribution of High-Skilled Immigrants to Innovation in the United States

By: Shai Bernstein, Rebecca Diamond, Abhisit Jiranaphawiboon, Timothy McQuade and Beatriz Pousada

We characterize the contribution of immigrants to US innovation, both through their direct productivity as well as through their indirect spillover effects on their native collaborators. To do so, we link patent records to a database containing the first five digits of... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; Economic Growth; Immigrants; Innovation and Invention; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Patents; Innovation Strategy

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2022
Article

The Effects of Public and Private Equity Markets on Firm Behavior

By: Shai Bernstein

In this article, I review the theoretical and empirical literature on the effects of public and private equity markets on firm behavior, emphasizing the consequences that emerge from disclosure requirements, ownership concentration, and degree of firm standardization.... View Details

Keywords: Corporate Finance And Governance; Financing Policy; Commercialization; Capital Markets; Private Equity; Public Equity; Venture Capital; Innovation and Invention; Cost of Capital

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August 2022
Teaching Note

LooksRare: The Decentralized, Tokenized, NFT Marketplace

By: Shai Benjamin Bernstein, Scott Duke Kominers and George Gonzalez

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 822-119. View Details

May 2022
Teaching Note

Chime Solutions

By: Shai Bernstein, William R. Kerr, Jim Matheson, Christopher Stanton and Ria Mazumdar

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 821-105. View Details

Keywords: Call Center; Black Entrepreneurs

2022
Working Paper

Do Startups Benefit from Their Investors' Reputation? Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment

By: Shai Benjamin Bernstein, Kunal Mehta, Richard Townsend and Ting Xu

We analyze a field experiment conducted on AngelList Talent, a large online search platform for startup jobs. In the experiment, AngelList randomly informed job seekers of whether a startup was funded by a top-tier investor and/or was funded recently. We find that the... View Details

Keywords: Startup Labor Market; Investors; Randomized Field Experiment; Certification Effect; Venture Capital; Business Startups; Human Capital; Job Search; Reputation

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March 2022
Module Note

Managing Exits and Liquidity in Entrepreneurial Finance

By: Shai Bernstein

March 2022 (Revised August 2022)
Case

LooksRare: The Decentralized, Tokenized, NFT Marketplace

By: Scott Duke Kominers, Shai Bernstein and George Gonzalez

LooksRare launched a decentralized and anonymous organization to compete against NFT marketplace leader OpenSea. By launching its own cryptocurrency, LooksRare attempted to lure users with a digital rewards program. The nature of the organization and its business... View Details

Keywords: NFTs; Alternative Assets; Blockchain; Cryptocurrency; Customer Relationship Management; Market Entry and Exit; Business Model; Marketing