We measure the aggregate return to all equity investors in various funding rounds of a venture company with the founders' investments valued at their first-round pre-money valuations. We examine 17,242 ventures that had their first funding rounds during 1980 and 2006 and follow them till their...

Performance evaluation of venture-capital (VC) payoffs is challenging because payoffs are infrequent, skewed, realized over endogenously varying time horizons, and cross- sectionally dependent. We show that standard stochastic discount factor (SDF) methods can be adapted to handle these issues....

We provide a model that links the high return to venture equity to the impatience of the VCs. VCs are scarce, and hence, they have market power and a high return on their investments. As a result, VCs are eager to terminate non-performing ventures so they can move on to new ones. The scarcity of...

Typically, studies of efforts of economic agents do not distinguish between efforts that directly generate returns (`return effort') and efforts that facilitate demonstration of return effort, that is, `return effort cost'. This study provides formal theoretical evidence that a distinguishing of...

During contract negotiations with a startup, a venture capitalist (VC) can receive preferred stock and additional cash flow rights, which result in a higher return than that of common stock. Incorporation of contract terms into the payoff to investor calculation not only changes the...

We provide a model that links the high return to venture equity to the impatience of the VCs. VCs are scarce, and hence, they have market power and a high return on their investments. As a result, VCs are eager to terminate non-performing ventures so they can move on to new ones. The scarcity of...

This paper measures the mean, standard deviation, alpha and beta of venture capital investments, using a maximum likelihood estimate that corrects for selection bias. Since firms go public when they have achieved a good return, estimates that do not correct for selection bias are optimistic. The...

I study expertise acquisition in a model of trading under asymmetric information. I propose and implement a method to estimate the ratio of social to private marginal value of expertise. This can be decomposed into three sufficient statistics: traders' average profits, the fraction of bad assets...