Inara S. Tareque

I am a 5th-year Ph.D. candidate in Management at Columbia Business School. 

Sitting at this intersection of social capital theory and entrepreneurship, my research examines when and why does social capital inhibit versus stimulate entrepreneurship. I partner with organizations that work directly with populations whose unique preferences and constraints help reveal novel mechanisms through which social capital shapes entrepreneurial decision-making. Some of these partnerships include the New York State Small Business Development Centers (SBDC), the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), Immigrants Rising, and Tract Advisors (a CDFI-support organization). These partnerships allow me to access administrative records and complement them with in-depth interviews, informing my theorizing through the unique lived experiences of these groups.

In my job market paper, I reveal how social capital may pull people away from entrepreneurship. Specifically, I maintain that a central tenet in entrepreneurship research holds that financial and social capital complement one another in promoting entrepreneurial entry. Yet social capital also provides access to wage employment opportunities, which may redirect individuals away from entrepreneurship. I show that in contexts where people pursue entrepreneurship out of necessity because of constrained labor market conditions, the complementarity does not hold. Social capital instead plays an occupational expansion role: by widening the set of feasible occupational choices, it lowers the risk of investing in wage work relative to entrepreneurship, thereby encouraging more individuals to invest financial reources into wage employment instead of entrepreneurship. I test this theory using quasi-exogenous variation from U.S. refugee placement policy in a mixed-methods design combining data on 69,406 refugees (1996–2020) with 30 in-depth interviews conducted through a two-year collaboration with a leading refugee resettlement organization in the United States.

Prior to joining Columbia Business School, I conducted research with the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative (SLEI) housed in Stanford Graduate School of Businesses. I collaborated closely with the GSB faculty to advance scholarship on U.S. Latino-owned ventures. Before SLEI, I performed research at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, where my research intersected ecosystem development, venture financing, and diversity in entrepreneurship.

I also developed and performed data analysis for Inc. to calculate the Inc. Entrepreneurship Index, a timely measure of American entrepreneurship. Additionally, in collaboration with Startup Genome and Inc., I developed the Inc. Surge Cities index which ranks U.S. metropolitan areas for starting a business using seven key indicators.

I completed my M.Phil from Columbia Business School, BA from Grinnell College with majors in Mathematics and Economics and a minor in Global Development Studies. My research been published in PNAS covered in leading news outlets such as Time, Forbes, Bloomberg, and Inc. magazine. My job market paper won the best 2026 OMT Social Netowrks Paper.