Existing literature suggests that entrepreneurs with prior firm-founding experience have moreskills and social connections than novice entrepreneurs. Such skills and social connectionscould give experienced founders some advantage in the process of raising venture capital.This paper uses a large...

Informed capital is a crucial ingredient to a well-functioning market for start-upfinance, especially in times of difficult market conditions. For bank-basedsystems, the question regarding which investors actually supply informed capitalhas not yet been answered. To fill this gap, we conduct a...

The paper offers a new explanation for the widely observed use of redeemable and convertible preferred stock in venture capital finance. Redeemable and convertible preferred stocks can be used to endogenously allocate cash flow and control rights as a function of the state of nature, the...

This paper investigates how patent applications and grants held by new ventures improve their abilityto attract venture capital (VC) financing. We argue that investors are faced with considerable uncertaintyand therefore rely on patents as signals when trying to assess the prospects of potential...

As most other countries, Germany also faces dramatic regional differences in terms of socioeconomic development. One important driver of such development is the existence of a healthy entrepreneurial activity and the creation of new companies. We argue that venture capital (VC) and especially...

Over the past ten years, private equity and venture capital have played an increasingly important role in the European economy. In parallel to the increase in investments, contribution of the private equity and venture capital industry to employment in Europe has grown.Against this background,...

Why do private firms stay private? Empirical evidence on this issue is sparse, as most private firms in the US do not report their financial results. We investigate why private status matters by taking advantage of a unique dataset of large, leveraged private firms with SEC filings. Unlike a...

Using a hand-collected sample of contracts and investment proposals from German venturecapital financing relationships, we analyze specific incentive conflicts. We apply indirect anddirect measures of these problems and extend the “direct” approach by Kaplan and Strömberg(2004) to a four-...

Using a hand-collected sample of contracts and investment proposals from German venturecapital (VC) financing relationships, we find that experienced and or private law/independentVC firms rely to a lesser degree on debt financing and more on certain covenants in VC con-tracting even when we...