In recent years, university endowments have received much attention for their spectacular returns and innovative investment strategies, but few papers have examined trends in the endowment sector at large. In this paper, we analyze a sample of 1,300 educational endowments between 1992 and 2005....

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...

While variations in public securities markets across nations have attracted increasing scrutiny, private financings have received little attention. But in developing nations, the bulk of financings are private ones. This paper analyzes 210 private equity transactions in developing countries. We...

The returns that institutional investors realize from private equity investments differ dramatically across institutions. Using detailed and hitherto unexplored records of fund investors and performance, we document large heterogeneity in the performance of different classes of limited partners....

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,...

This paper estimates the extent to which legal fees prevent liquidity-constrained households from declaring bankruptcy. To do so, it studies how the 2001 and 2008 tax rebates affected consumer bankruptcy filings. We exploit the randomized timing of the rebate checks and estimate that the rebates...

We estimate the magnitude of spillovers generated by 112 academic "superstars" who died pre- maturely and unexpectedly, thus providing an exogenous source of variation in the structure of their collaborators' coauthorship networks. Following the death of a superstar, we find that collaborators...

This paper examines the impact of the financial crisis of 2008 on the federal funds market, specifically the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. Rather than a complete collapse of lending in the presence of a market wide shock, we see that banks become more restrictive in which counterparties they...

In this paper we test whether procrastination and planning problems affect the performance, compensation and work satisfaction among employees. We conducted a randomized controlled experiment with a bank in Colombia to change the frequency and intensity with which employees received reminders...