We find that male participants in Harvard Business School's New Venture Competition who were randomly exposed to more VC investors on their panel were substantially more likely to start a VC-backed startup post-graduation, indicating that access to investors impacts fundraising independent of...

An extensive literature on venture capital has studied asymmetric information and agency problems between investors and entrepreneurs, examining how separating entrepreneurs from the investor can create frictions that might inhibit the funding of good projects. It has largely abstracted away...

With an overall lack of gender and ethnic diversity in the innovation sector documented in Gompers and Wang (2017), we ask the natural next question: Does increased diversity lead to better firm performances? In this paper, we attempt to answer this question using a unique dataset of the gender...

We study the role of homophily in group formation. Using a unique dataset of MBA students, we observe homophily in ethnicity and gender increases the probability of forming teams by 25%. Homophily in education and past working experience increases the probability of forming teams by 17% and 11%...

By comparing patenting among VC-backed firms to the universe of patents filed in the USPTO over the period 1976-2019, we document that while patents filed by VC backed firms are of significantly higher quality and economic importance than the average patent, VC-backed innovation is substantially...