How individuals shape the capabilities of firms: Evidence from corporate acquisitions and entrepreneurial spawning

This dissertation studies how executives and entrepreneurs through their learned knowledge and ties gained through past professional experiences shape firm capabilities, and influence firms' initiatives in strategic factor markets aimed at capability development. I examine this in the context of executive managers and a firm's acquisition capability, as well as in the context of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial spawning, making use of two novel separate international datasets containing micro-data on individuals and firms. More specifically, in the first two studies of my dissertation, I examine how a manager's acquisition-relevant human capital obtained through past professional experiences inside and outside of the focal firm shapes the firm's acquisition capability and the firm's future acquisition behavior. For those two studies, I have assembled micro-data on over 75,000 executives from over 11,000 firms worldwide. The third study examines how the location of the entrepreneur's past professional experiences imprints the capabilities of young firms in the global hedge fund industry. This study makes use of a separate hand-collected international dataset on over 1,000 hedge fund entrepreneurs and hedge fund start-ups.;Overall, this dissertation complements and extends existing research in strategic management and entrepreneurship which has largely focused on firm-level factors in explaining how learning and ties shape firm capabilities, by focusing on the role of individual managers in shaping firm capabilities. Through the use of fine-grained data, this dissertation is also able to give nuanced insights into the effect of individuals on firms, and show how this effect is co-dependent on firm-level factors.