Michael and Enid Mescon Lecture Series

Michael and Enid Mescon Endowed Chair

As a memorial to Michael Mescon and the extraordinary legacy he left Georgia State, the chair recognizes Mescon’s career in management (private, public and nonprofit sectors) and leadership development, along with his gifts in teaching the next generation of public service leaders.

Cathy Yang Liu currently holds this position.

The 2025 Mescon Lecture

April 1 at 10:30 AM – Robert Fairlie

“The Promise and Peril of Entrepreneurship: Startups, Job Creation and Policy”

55 Park Place, NE, Suite 903/904, Atlanta GA 30303

Dr. Robert Fairlie is Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and Economics at UCLA, and member of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He serves as the Chair of Department of Public Policy in the Luskin School of Public Affairs. He studies a wide range of topics including entrepreneurship, education, labor, racial, gender and caste inequality, information technology, immigration, health, and development. He received a Ph.D. and M.A. from Northwestern University and B.A. with honors from Stanford University, and has held full-time or visiting positions at UC Santa Cruz, Stanford University, Yale University, UC Berkeley, and Australian National University. He has received funding from the National Science Foundation, National Academies, and Russell Sage Foundation as well as numerous government agencies and foundations, and has testified in front of the U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Department of Treasury, and the California State Assembly.

Federal, state and local governments spend billions of dollars each year on incubators, training programs, loan programs, tax breaks, and investor incentives to encourage business formation. These expenditures are often made without knowing whether these programs launch startups that create lasting, decent-paying jobs. In the talk I will present findings from a new book published with MIT Press, The Promise and Peril of Entrepreneurship. The book provides a broader view of entrepreneurship, based on new comprehensive data including all US businesses, that challenges what we know about job creation and survival among US startups. From this perspective, startups create jobs and power economic growth in the US economy, but job creation per startup and survival rates are much lower than those typically reported by federal sources and often touted by pundits as the official number. There is also substantial inequality in startup ownership. For example, we find that 7 percent of startups are Black owned but 12 percent of the labor force is Black. We also find that Black, Latinx and Native American owned startups have fewer initial employees. I will also present findings from a new study of a comprehensive set of state and local policies such as tax rates, incentives and minimum wages on startup outcomes.