This paper explores a new role for venture capitalists, as knowledge intermediaries. A venture capital investor can communicate valuable knowledge to an entrepreneur, facilitating innovation. The venture capitalist can also communicate the entrepreneur's innovative knowledge to other portfolio...

Innovative start-ups and venture capitalists are highly clustered, benefiting from localized spillovers: Silicon Valley is perhaps the best example. There is also substantial geographical variation in venture capital contracts: California contracts are more 'incomplete'. This paper explores the...

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...

What role do sentiment investors play in the pricing of newly listed stocks? We derive conditions under which we can distinguish between sentiment and rational pricing behaviour and test for the rationality of small investors’ demand for new stock issues using data from pre-issue (or...

We usually assume increases in supply, allocation by rationing, and exclusion of potential buyers will never raise prices. But all of these activities raise the expected price in an important set of cases when common-value assets are sold. Furthermore, when we make the assumptions needed to rule...

Under the bookbuilding procedure, an investment banker solicits bids for shares from institutional investors prior to pricing the issue. After collecting this demand information, the investment banker prices the issue and allocates shares to the investors. We examine the books from 39...

Until 1970, the New York Stock Exchange prohibited public incorporation of member firms. After the rules were relaxed to allow joint stock firm membership, investment-banking concerns organized as partnerships or closely-held private corporations went public in waves, with Goldman Sachs (1999)...

In our model, information-producing agents can opt to produce from the sell-side, in which case they can only sell their information to other market participants, or produce from the buy-side, in which case they agent can trade in the financial market. If sell-side information substitutes for...