Sociological investigations of economic exchange pay particular attention to the manner in which institutions and social structures shape transactions among economic actors. Extending this line of inquiry, we explore how interfirm networks in the US venture capital (VC) market from 1986 to 1998...

We argue that the stock of prior alliances between participants in the biotechnology sector forms a network that serves as a governance mechanism in interfirm transactions. To test how this network substitutes for other governance mechanisms, we examine how equity participation and pledged...

We conduct a detailed analysis of 125 strategic alliance contracts, all of which concern early-stage, genomics-based research at small, biotechnology Ramp;D companies. Staged investment is ubiquitous, but solutions to agency problems vary. The cycle of equity participation in alliances resembles...

Strategic alliances are commonplace in the biotechnology sector. We posit that the stock of prior alliances between participants in the biotech industry produces a network---a communications infrastructure established by past transactions---through which information is transmitted. We argue that...

In this paper, we examine the propensity for U.S. public companies to become targets for private equity-backed, take-private transactions. We consider the characteristics of 483 private equity-backed deals in the 2000-2007 period relative to public companies, and find that, in addition to the...

In a market context, a status effect occurs when actors are accorded differential recognition for their efforts depending on their location in a status ordering, holding constant the quality of these efforts. In practice, because it is very difficult to measure quality, this ceteris paribus...

We examine the individual, contextual, and institutional determinants of faculty patenting behavior in a panel dataset spanning the careers of 3,884 academic life scientists. Using a combination of discrete time hazard rate models and fixed effects logistic models, we find that patenting events...