We test under what circumstances boards discipline managers and whether such interventions improve performance. We exploit exogenous variation due to the staggered adoption of corporate governance laws in formerly Communist countries coupled with detailed ‘hard’ information about the...

Venture capitalists provide risk capital and valuable monitoring services that are essential for the success of upstart companies. The financial sector’s expertise in monitoring investment proposals may increase with the accumulated experience in funding such projects. In the other direction,...

We analyze incentives to develop entrepreneurial ideas for venture capitalists (VCs) and incumbent firms. If VCs are sufficiently better at judging an idea's value and if it is sufficiently more costly to patent low than high value ideas, VCs acquire valuable ideas, develop them beyond the level...

Contractual execution generates hard information, available to the contracting parties, even when contracts are secretly executed. Building on this simple observation, the paper shows that incomplete contracts can be preferred to complete contracts. This is because (i) execution of incomplete...

We compare the characteristics of real world financial contracts to their counterparts in financial contracting theory, by studying actual contracts between venture capitalists (VCs) and entrepreneurs. (1) The distinguishing characteristic of VC financing is that they allow VCs to separately...

A model of start-up finance with double moral hazard is proposed. Entrepreneurs have ideas but lack their own resources as well as commercial experience. Venture capitalists provide start-up finance and managerial support. Both types of agents thus jointly contribute to the firm's success, but...

When a young entrepreneurial firm matures, it is often necessary to replace the founding entrepreneur by a professional manager. This replacement decision can be affected by the private benefits of control enjoyed by the entrepreneur which gives rise to a conflict of interest between the...

Venture capital financing is characterized by extensive use of convertible debt and stage financing. The paper shows why convertible debt is better than a simple mixture of debt and equity in stage financing situations. When the venture capitalist retains the option to abandon the project, the...

We study the investment analyses of 67 portfolio investments by 11 venture capital (VC) firms. VCs consider the attractiveness and risks of the business, management, and deal terms as well as expected post-investment monitoring. We then consider the relation of the analyses to the contractual...

For the sample period of 1965-1992, Kortum and Lerner (2000) find that venture capital (VC) investments have a positive impact on patent count at industry level, and this impact is larger than that of R&D expenditures. We confirm that this positive impact continued to be present and became even...