Why does venture capital work in some countries but not in others? This clinical study of the first German venture capital firm examines the difficulties of creating a venture capital market in a bank-based financial system. The analysis identifies the problem of creating appropriate governance...

This paper examines empirical evidence on the impact that venture capitalists have on the development path of new firms. We use a hand-collected data set on Silicon Valley start-up companies that allows us to "look inside the black box" and analyze the influence of venture capital on the...

This paper considers potential disagreements between an entrepreneur and a venture capitalist about the desirability of taking a company public. Convertible securities are shown to be optimal for a novel reason. In particular, it is shown that automatic conversion at the time of the IPO takes...

Many new firms are started by entrepreneurs who got the idea while working for their previous employer. Sometimes employers also agree to develop their employees' ideas internally. This paper develops a multi-task incentives model to analyze optimal corporate strategies towards employee...

This paper provides a new explanation for the use of convertible securities in venture capital, which is based on the trade-off between acquisition or IPOs. A key property of convertible preferred equity is that it allocates different cash flow rights, depending on whether exit occurs by...

Most theories of the firm ignore the entrepreneurial process of how the various resources of the firm are combined in the first place. This paper examines the process of how an entrepreneur obtains commitments from multiple resource providers to create a new venture. Resource providers may be...

Much of the recent growth and development literature is based on the notion that economies may exhibit multiple equilibria. An economy may get stuck in a vicious circle of poverty as a result of a coordination failure. Little attention has been given to which economic institutions may solve such...