This paper develops a model to study how entrepreneurs and venture-capital investors deal with moral hazard, effort provision, asymmetric information and hold-up problems. We explore several financing scenarios, including first-best, monopolistic, syndicated and fully competitive financing. We...

Family ownership was rapidly diluted in the twentieth century in Britain. The main cause was equity issued in the process of making acquisitions. In the first half of the century, it occurred in the absence of minority investor protection and relied on directors of target firms protecting the...

We compare sources of funds and investment activities of venture capital (VC) funds in Germany, Israel, Japan and the UK using a newly constructed data set. The data provide a rare opportunity to evaluate relations between funds' sources of finance and activities. We find that sources of VC...

This paper examines means of payment in over 2,500 acquisitions in the UK and US over the period 1955 to 1985. Data on financing proportions, bid premia and postmerger performance are used to test the validity of tax and information hypotheses. It is difficult to explain many of the results in...

We conduct the first field experiment of a performance-contingent microfinance contract. A large food multinational wishes to help micro-distributors in its supply chain with the financing of a productive asset. Working with the firm in Kenya, we compare asset financing under a traditional debt...