Field experiments

Family ties may strengthen trust and coordination within entrepreneurial teams, but their consequences for external audiences remain less understood. We examine whether sibling cofounding affects startup hiring and whether this effect is moderated by lead-founder gender. We test these questions using a preregistered two-stage LinkedIn field experiment embedded in a real hiring process, complemented by a preregistered online experiment on Prolific. The field experiment provides causal evidence that sibling cofounding reduces applicant attraction, but only conditionally: the penalty is concentrated in male-leading sibling teams, whereas female-leading sibling teams in some comparisons are even weakly preferred to comparable non-family teams. Supplementary analyses further suggest that this pattern may extend to applicant sorting: among highly educated candidates, male-led sibling teams appear less attractive, whereas female-led sibling teams appear more attractive. The online experiment replicates the same asymmetric pattern and identifies startup attractiveness as the central moderated mediator: male-leading sibling teams are penalized because they are seen as less attractive employers, with this discount accompanied by stronger boundary-related concerns and weaker assessments of professionalism and fairness. An additional analysis of Finnish register data on the population of two-founder ventures shows the same asymmetry in realized employment: sibling ventures led by a brother employ fewer people in their first five years than comparable non-family ventures, whereas those led by a sister do not. Together, these findings show that sibling cofounding does not create a uniform hiring penalty. Instead, its labor-market consequences depend critically on who leads the venture.

Paper available upon request.