From 2010 to 2021, 639 US VC-funded firms achieved unicorn status. We investigate why there are so many unicorns and why controlling shareholders give investors privileges to obtain unicorn status. We show that unicorns rely more than other VC-funded firms on organizational capital as well as...

This paper analyzes the determinants of governance transparency. In our model, entrepreneurs optimally decide the precision of their earning reporting by trading off the possibility of expropriating profits against the capacity to attract external funding.We find that information is only...