Mortgage loans are leading examples of transactions where experts on one side of the market take advantage of consumers' lack of knowledge and experience. We study the compensation that borrowers pay to mortgage brokers for assistance from application to closing. Two findings support the...

Mortgage loans are leading examples of transactions where experts on one side of the market take advantage of consumers' lack of knowledge and experience. We study the compensation that borrowers pay to mortgage brokers for assistance from application to closing. Two findings support the...

Entrepreneurship is risky. We study the risk facing a well-documented and important class of entrepreneurs, those backed by venture capital. Using a dynamic program, we calculate the certainty-equivalent of the difference between the cash rewards that entrepreneurs actually received over the...

The standard venture-capital contract rewards entrepreneurs only for creating successful companies that go public or are acquired on favorable terms. As a result, entrepreneurs receive no help from venture capital in avoiding the huge idiosyncratic risk of the typical venture-backed startup....

In the standard venture capital contract, entrepreneurs have a large fraction of equity ownership in the companies they found and are paid a sub-market salary by the investors who provide the money to develop the idea. The big rewards come only to those whose companies go public or are acquired...

We describe a new index of the current and historical returns to venture-type capital. The conceptual basis for the index is the value of a continuously reinvested value-weighted portfolio of all venture-backed and similar pre-public companies. It provides a metric for private equity comparable...

Discusses how to measure the cost of owner-occupied housing and compares the tax treatments of owner-occupied and rental housing. Argues that it is inaccurate to characterize the mortgage interest deduction as a subsidy to homeownership, and that the true advantage to owner-occupied housing lies...

In this paper we build an index of value for venture capital. Our approach overcomes the problems of intermittent, infrequent pricing of private company deals by using a repeat valuation model to build the index, and it corrects for selection bias in the reporting of values. We use a unique data...