This paper examines the division of founder shares in entrepreneurial ventures, focusing on the decision of whether or not to divide the shares equally among all founders. To motivate the empirical analysis we develop a simple theory of costly bargaining, where founders trade off the simplicity...

We use an extensive panel of 17 million individuals born between 1947 and 1995 from China's largest online marketplace, Taobao, to study the impact of RAE on the propensity to become an entrepreneur. Using events surrounding the Cultural Revolution and the issuance of the Compulsory Education...

We use administrative registration records with information on the owners of all Chinese firms to document their connections through equity investments. We show that the largest private owners have direct equity ties with state owners, the next largest private owners have equity ties with...