We study how firm characteristics evolve from early business plan to initial public offering to public company for 49 venture capital financed companies. The average time elapsed is almost 6 years. We describe the financial performance, business idea, point(s) of differentiation, non-human...

We describe and present time series evidence on the leveraged buyout/private equity industry, both firms and transactions. We discuss the existing empirical evidence on the economics of the firms and transactions. We consider similarities and differences between the recent private equity wave...

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...

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 presents a model of the financial structure of private equity firms. In the model, the general partner of the firm encounters a sequence of deals over time where the exact quality of each deal cannot be credibly communicated to investors. We show that the optimal financing arrangement...

To understand the investment behavior of venture capital (VC) investors, this paper estimates a dynamic model of learning. Behavior reflecting both learning from past investments (exploitation) and anticipated future learning (exploration) are found to be prevalent, and the model's additional...

I study the security design problem of a firm when investors rather than managers have private information about the firm. I find that it is often optimal to issue information-sensitive securities like equity. The "folklore proposition of debt" from traditional signalling models only goes...

An unusually rich source of data on housing prices in Stockholm is used to analyze the investment implications of housing choices. This empirical analysis derives market-wide price and return series for housing investment during a 13-year period, and it also provides estimates of the...

Using a data set that provides unprecedented details on the stockholders of Swedish listed companies, we analyze whether investors take into account corporate governance when they select stocks. We identify the companies where shareholders’ value is less likely to be maximized by using the...

I provide evidence that analysts whose earnings forecast revisions showed signs of greater exaggeration in the past make recommendation changes that lead to lower abnormal returns than their peers. Interpreting stock recommendations as a forecast of future abnormal returns, I show that this...