Existing literature suggests that entrepreneurs with prior firm-founding experience have more skills and social connections than novice entrepreneurs. Such skills and social connections could give experienced founders some advantage in the process of raising venture capital. This paper uses a...

Research shows that most ventures fail, yet it has devoted limited attention to the consequences of entrepreneurs' past failure for investors' decisions. Our motivating insight is that failure can be due to bad luck, lack of skill or both. Therefore, failure conveys ambiguous information about...

While many firms compete through the development of new technologies and products, it is well known that new-to-the-world innovation is inherently risky and therefore may increase the probability of firm death. However, many existing studies consistently find a negative association between...

We investigate the interdependence of debt financing and R&D activities of young firms. Using micro-level data of the KfW/ZEW Start-up Panel, our estimation results show that firm characteristics are more important than personal characteristics of the founders for explaining young firms'...

Do higher proportions of (a) informed investors and (b) high-quality projects increase the number of good projects that are ultimately financed via crowdfunding? A simple model and simulation reveals the answers to both questions to be: "not necessarily".

Anglo-Saxon countries have been successful in the 1990s concerning labor market performance compared to the former role models Germany and Japan. This reversal in relative economic performance might be related to idiosyncracies in financial markets with bank-based financial markets as in Germany...