The U.S. entrepreneurial finance market has changed dramatically over the last two decades. Entrepreneurs raising their first round of venture capital retain 30% more equity in their firm and are more likely to control their board of directors. Late-stage startups are raising larger amounts of...

The deregulation of securities laws|in particular the National Securities Markets Improvement Act (NSMIA) of 1996|has increased the supply of private capital to late-stage private startups, which are now able to grow to a size that few private firms used to reach. NSMIA is one of a number of...

We examine the relation between venture capital (VC) investments and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity around the world. We find evidence of a strong positive association between VC investments and lagged M&A activity, consistent with the hypothesis that an active M&A market provides...

Over the past two decades, the U.S. stock market has been shrinking as the public firm model has begun to fall out of favor. We develop a political economy model of delistings to study the wider economic consequences of this trend. We show that the private and social incentives to delist firms...

This survey reviews the growing body of academic work on venture capital. It lays out the major data sources used. It examines the work on venture capital investments in companies, looking at issues of selection, contracting, post-investment services and exits. The survey considers recent work...

We estimate the impact of piped water and sewers on property values in mid-19th century Chicago. The cost of sewer construction depends sensitively on imperceptible variation in grade, and such variations in grade delay water and sewer service to part of the city. This delay provides...

A modest approximation by homebuyers leads house prices to display three features that are present in the data but usually missing from perfectly rational models: momentum at one-year horizons, mean reversion at five-year horizons, and excess longer-term volatility relative to fundamentals....

Like many other assets, housing prices are quite volatile relative to observable changes in fundamentals. If we are going to understand boom-bust housing cycles, we must incorporate housing supply. In this paper, we present a simple model of housing bubbles that predicts that places with more...

This paper documents the trends in the life-cycle profiles of net worth and housing equity between 1983 and 2004. The net worth of older households significantly increased during the housing boom of recent years. However, net worth grew by more than housing equity, in part because other assets...

This article examines and quantifies the relationship between local amenities and prices in an equilibrium model, demonstrating the role of non-traded goods and federal taxes. I derive formulae using factor shares to infer local land rents, productivity, and the total value of amenities from...