This paper examines the direct private equity investment strategies across sovereign wealth funds and their relationship to the funds' organizational structures. SWFs seem to engage in a form of trend chasing, since they are more likely to invest at home when domestic equity prices are higher,...

In this paper, we examine the IMF's role in maintaining the access of emerging market economies to international capital markets. We find evidence that both macroeconomic aggregates and capital flows improve following the adoption of an IMF program, although they may initially deteriorate...

This paper documents the role of angel funding for the growth, survival, and access to follow-on funding of high-growth start-up firms. We use a regression discontinuity approach to control for unobserved heterogeneity between firms that obtain funding and those that do not. This technique...

We document geographic concentration by both venture capital firms and venture capital-financed companies in three cities - San Francisco, Boston, and New York. We find that firms open new satellite offices based on the success rate of venture capital-backed investments in an area. Geography is...

Reverse leveraged buyouts (RLBOs) have received increased public scrutiny but attracted little systematic study. We collect a comprehensive sample of 496 RLBOs between 1980 and 2002 and examine three- and five-year stock performance of these offerings. RLBOs appear to consistently outperform...

We explore the impact of the institutional environment on the nature of entrepreneurial activity across Europe. Political, legal, and regulatory variables that have been shown to impact capital market development influence entrepreneurial activity in the emerging markets of Europe, but not in...

Financial economists in recent years have closely examined and intensely debated the performance of initial public offerings using data after the formation of NASDAQ. The paper seeks to shed light on this controversy by undertaking a large, out-of-sample study: we examine the performance for up...

Private equity critics claim that leveraged buyouts bring huge job losses. To investigate this claim, we construct and analyze a new dataset that covers U.S. private equity transactions from 1980 to 2005. We track 3,200 target firms and their 150,000 establishments before and after acquisition,...

Using a difference-in-difference approach, we study how intellectual property right (IPR) protection affects innovation in China in the years around the privatizations of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Innovation increases after SOE privatizations, and this increase is larger in cities with...