Entrepreneurship is essential to job creation and to productivity growth and therefore is an important matter for government policy. However, policymakers face a difficult challenge because successful growth for a few firms-which cannot easily be identified in advance-is accompanied by...

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...

We use investment-level data to study performance persistence in venture capital (VC). Consistent with prior studies, we find that each additional IPO among a VC firm's first ten investments predicts as much as an 8% higher IPO rate on its subsequent investments, though this effect erodes with...

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...

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...

We document new facts on the evolution of founder-CEO compensation in venture capital-backed startups. Having a tangible product (“product market fit”) is a fundamental milestone in CEOs' compensation, marking the point where liquid cash compensation increases significantly – well before...

We find that VC-backed firms receiving their initial investment in hot markets are more likely to go bankrupt, but conditional on going public are valued higher on the day of their IPO, have more patents and have more citations to their patents. Our results suggest that VCs invest in riskier and...

We find that venture capital-backed startups receiving their initial investment in hot markets are more likely to go bankrupt, but conditional on going public, are valued higher on the day of their initial public offering, have more patents, and have more citations to their patents. Our results...

We examine how investors' tolerance for failure impacts the types of projects they are willing to fund. We show that actions that reduce short term accountability and thus encourage agents to experiment more simultaneously reduce the level of experimentation financial backers are willing to...

Entrepreneurship is essential to job creation and to productivity growth and therefore is an important matter for government policy. However, policymakers face a difficult challenge because successful growth for a few firms—which cannot easily be identified in advance—is accompanied by...