We analyze venture capital (VC) investments in twenty-three non-U.S. countries and compare them to U.S. VC investments. We describe how the contracts allocate cash flow, board, liquidation, and other control rights. In univariate analyses, contracts differ across legal regimes. However, more...

Survey and option data are used to take a new look at the equity premium puzzle. Survey data on equity returns (Livingston survey) shows much lower expected excess returns than ex post data. At the same time, option data (CBOE's VIX) indicates that investors overestimate the volatility of equity...

The impact of separating cash flow and votes depends on the ownership structure. In widely held firms, one share - one vote is in general not optimal. While it ensures an efficient outcome in bidding contests, dual-class shares mitigate the free-rider problem, thereby promoting takeovers. In the...

This paper presents a model of the financial structure of private equity firms. In the model, the general partner of the firm encounters a sequence of deals over time where the exact quality of each deal cannot be credibly communicated to investors. We show that the optimal financing arrangement...

In this paper we study the changes in corporate valuation, investments, and financing choices induced by the formation of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in Europe. We use corporate-level data from ten countries that adopted the euro, the three EU countries that did not join EMU, as well as...

This paper studies bidder behavior using a detailed data set consisting of actual bid distributions in Norwegian Treasury bill auctions held during 1993-1998. The empirical results presented suggest that observed bidder behavior is consistent with an adjustment for the winner’s curse. Bidders...

This paper investigates the relation between the term structure of rents and future spot rents. A rich database of office rental agreements for various maturities is used to estimate the term structure of rents, and from this structure implicit forward rents are extracted. The data pertain to...

We examine how the relative bargaining power of privately informed venture capitalists and entrepreneurs - determined either by market conditions or by prior experience - affects both the willingness of venture capitalists to invest and the terms of their financing contracts. Our results...

After the Meese & Rogoff 1983-results, researchers have searched with torch for macroeconomic variables with predictive power on horizons shorter than 6 months. Recently, several papers have showed that order flows influence exchange rates intradaily. Maybe order flow may be of importance also...

We study the investment analyses of 67 portfolio investments by 11 venture capital (VC) firms. VCs describe the strengths and risks of the investments as well as expected post-investment monitoring. We classify the risks into three categories and relate them to VC cash flow rights, control...