Zahra Hejrati

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2019 - 2020 Academic Year

How Can Digital Platforms and Data-Driven Algorithms Foster Entrepreneurship Among Refugees?

With 25.9M refugee cases recorded by the UN in 2018, refugees' self-reliance has become a challenge for policymakers. Recent research focuses on refugees' wage employment to address this issue, while many refugee-hosting countries struggle with a high unemployment rate of their citizens. This project focuses on entrepreneurship as a solution for the refugees' self-reliance issue. Literature shows that refugees have stronger entrepreneurial incentives compared to local citizens, but they face greater challenges in starting and growing their businesses. This project aims to study how providing entrepreneurship education and facilitating refugees' team formation using data-driven methods, such as machine learning and matching algorithms, can promote entrepreneurship among refugees.

Zahra Hejrati, Department of Management Science and Engineering

Zahra Hejrati is a PhD student at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program in the Department of Management Science & Engineering. Hejrati’s research interest is at the intersection of entrepreneurial processes, digital platforms, and data-driven algorithms. More specifically, she is interested in how the latter two affect entrepreneurial processes such as team formation, and resource acquisition, and whether it improves entrepreneurs' chance of success. Prior to attending Stanford, Hejrati worked at a massive open online course startup in her home country of Iran, as an early employee. She holds a BS in physics and a minor in economics from Sharif University of Technology, Iran.

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