Large shareholders may play an important role for firm policies and performance, but identifying an effect empirically presents a challenge due to the endogeneity of ownership structures. However, unlike other blockholders, individuals tend to hold blocks in corporations that are located close...

We develop an empirical framework that allows us to analyze the effects of heterogeneity across large shareholders, using a new blockholder-firm panel data set in which we can track all unique blockholders among large public U.S. firms. We find statistically significant and economically...

Lifetime incomes of private equity general partners are affected by their current funds’ performance through both carried interest profit sharing provisions, and also by the effect of the current fund’s performance on general partners’ abilities to raise capital for future funds. We...

This paper explores a continuous-time agency model with double moral hazard. Using a venture capitalist—entrepreneur relationship where a manager provides unobservable effort while a venture capitalist (VC) both supplies unobservable effort and chooses the optimal timing of the initial public...

In this paper, we explore a dynamic theory of investment and costly managerial turnover given agency conflicts between the firm manager and investors. We incorporate the possibility of the successive replacement of managers until the firm is finally liquidated, and develop a continuous-time...

We analyze venture capital (VC) investments in twenty-three non-U.S. countries and compare them to U.S. VC investments. We describe how the contracts allocate cash flow, board, liquidation, and other control rights. In univariate analyses, contracts differ across legal regimes. However, more...

We examine how the relative bargaining power of privately informed venture capitalists and entrepreneurs - determined either by market conditions or by prior experience - affects both the willingness of venture capitalists to invest and the terms of their financing contracts. Our results...

We study the investment analyses of 67 portfolio investments by 11 venture capital (VC) firms. VCs describe the strengths and risks of the investments as well as expected post-investment monitoring. We classify the risks into three categories and relate them to VC cash flow rights, control...

A long-standing controversy is whether LBOs relieve managers from short-term pressures from public shareholders, or whether LBO funds themselves are driven by short-term profit motives and sacrifice long-term growth to boost short-term performance. We investigate 495 transactions with a focus on...

This paper focuses on the conflicting dimensions of the involvement of venture capitalists as advisors and monitors in entrepreneurial projects. It argues that advising is congruent while monitoring dissonant with respect to entrepreneurial preferences. The analysis shows that despite the...