When Spouses Found Together: Evidence from a Field Experiment on Startup Hiring

Strategy & Business Policy

Speaker: Tiantian Yang

Professor - Wharton

Conference  Jouy-en-Josas / room meeting (T015)

ABSTRACT

Spousal founding teams are common, yet their ability to attract new hires remain poorly understood. While prior research emphasizes the internal benefits of spousal configurations, such as trust and cohesion, we propose that spousal teams raise concerns with external audiences by blurring professional and personal roles. Focusing on prospective employees, we predict that startups led by spousal teams face an “illegitimacy discount” in hiring, attracting fewer hires, particularly when the lead founder is male. We test this argument using a multi-method design. A pre-registered field experiment embedded in a live startup recruitment process provides causal evidence: job candidates were significantly less likely to apply to spousal-led ventures, with the penalty concentrated in male-led teams. An analysis of data from Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics II establishes the external validity of our findings, showing that spousal teams are prevalent but less likely to hire employees than non-spousal teams. Together, our findings extend research on founding team composition and gender disparities in entrepreneurship by revealing how spousal cofounding affects startups’ ability to attract talent and highlighting how gendered expectations condition evaluations of legitimacy in early hiring markets.