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...

The paper studies the effects of tax policy on venture capital activity. Entrepreneurs pursue a single high risk project each but have no own resources. Financiers provide equity finance. They must structure the entrepreneur's profit share and base salary to assure their incentives for full...

This paper studies how corporate research and development (R&D) investment affects labor mobility. We use employer-employee matched data in ordinary least squares and instrumental variables analyses to assess four hypotheses. R&D has no effect on worker retention, exit from employment, or...

Early crowdfunding platforms were based on a premise of disintermediation from professional investors, and relied on the ‘wisdom of the crowd' to screen high quality projects. This becomes problematic when equity is involved, as the degree of asymmetric information between entrepreneurs...

We estimate the impact of venture capital (VC) contract terms on startup outcomes and the split of value between the entrepreneur and investor, accounting for endogenous selection via a novel dynamic search and matching model. The estimation uses a new, large data set of first financing rounds...

This paper develops a novel approach for assessing the role of passive learning versus a proactive growth orientation in the entrepreneurial growth process. We develop a simple model linking early-stage founder choices, venture capital investment and skewed growth outcomes such as the...