Eponymous Entrepreneurs⇤ Sharon Belenzon† Aaron K. Chatterji‡ Brendan Daley§ Fuqua School of Business Duke University November 11, 2014 Abstract We demonstrate that firm eponymy—the familiar convention of firms being named after their owners—is linked to superior performance. We propose a novel ex- planation, referred to as “utility amplification,” and develop a corresponding signaling model. The model generates three main empirical predictions: (1) The incidence of eponymy will be low; (2) Eponymous firms will outperform other firms; (3) These e↵ects will be intensified when the entrepreneur’s name is rare. Using unique data on over 485,000 firms from Europe and the United States, we find support for all of these predictions. Several extensions and robustness checks are considered. Keywords: Entrepreneurship, Signaling, Firm Names ⇤The authors thank seminar participants at Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Northwestern, NBER, UCLA, and UVA for their useful comments and suggestions. †
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[email protected] 1 Introduction Many firms are eponymously named; that is, they bear the name(s) of their founding owner(s). Leveraging a unique dataset, this paper demonstrates that eponymy is linked to superior firm performance. For instance, controlling for other characteristics, eponymous ventures generate, on average, a 3.2 percentage-point higher return on assets (ROA), which is approximately one-third the magnitude of the sample mean ROA. Further, and perhaps counterintuitively, we propose that non-pecuniary considerations may be a large driver of the eponymy-performance relationship. Succinctly put, we propose that eponymy creates a stronger association between the entrepreneur and her firm that amplifies the utility or disutility of favorable or unfavorable market outcomes, respectively.