Because time is a key determinant of entrepreneurial decision making, time-to-event models are ubiquitous in entrepreneurship. Widespread econometric misconception, however, may cause complicated biases in existing studies. The reason is spurious duration dependency, a complicated form of endogeneity caused by unobserved heterogeneity, which is particularly pronounced in entrepreneurship data. This article discusses the endogeneity problem and methods to ‘debias’ time-to-event models in entrepreneurship. Simulations and empirical evidence indicate that only the frailty approach yields consistently unbiased parameter estimates. An application to start-up firms' time-to-funding shows that other methods lead to dramatic biases. Therefore, this article advocates a paradigm shift in the modeling of time variables in entrepreneurship.

因为时间是创业决策的关键决定因素，所以时间-事件模型在创业中无处不在。然而，广泛存在的计量经济学误解可能会导致现有研究出现复杂的偏差。原因是虚假的持续时间依赖性，这是一种由未观察到的异质性引起的复杂内生性形式，这在创业数据中尤为明显。本文讨论了企业家精神中“去偏”时间-事件模型的内生性问题和方法。模拟和经验证据表明，只有脆弱的方法产生一致的无偏参数估计。对初创公司的融资时间的应用表明，其他方法会导致严重的偏差。因此，本文提倡在创业中时间变量建模的范式转变。