This paper studies the effect of business partners on the commercialization of invention-based ventures, and it assesses the relative importance of the complementary skills, contacts, and financial capital that these partners may add to the original inventor-entrepreneur. Projects run by...

One explanation provided for the relatively high and increasingly stable spreads for moderate - sized IPOs ($20-$80 million) documented in Chen and Ritter (2000) is that issuing firms focus less on price and more on a combination of investment bank-differentiating factors (such as underwriter...

We provide the first measurement of knowledge spillovers from venture capital-financed companies onto the patenting activities of other companies. On average, these spillovers are nine times larger than those generated by the R&D investment of established companies. Spillover effects are larger...

Policy makers typically interpret positive relations between venture capital investments and innovations as an evidence that venture capital investments stimulate innovation (quot;VC-first hypothesisquot;). This interpretation is, however, one-sided because there may be a reverse causality that...

The objective of this study is to determine whether specific industries across countries or within countries are more likely to reach a stage of profitability and make a successful exit. In particular, we assess whether firms in certain industries are more prone to exit via IPO, be acquired, or...

The objective of this study is to determine whether specific industries across countries or within countries are more likely to reach a stage of profitability and make a successful exit. In particular, we assess whether firms in certain industries are more prone to exit via IPO, be acquired, or...

We investigate the decisions of listed firms to go private once again. We start by revealing that while a significant number of firms which go public is VC-backed, an overproportional share of these VC-backed firms go private later on (they stay on the exchange for an average of 8.5 years). We...

We evaluate the performance of limited partners' (LPs) private equity investments over time. Using a sample of 14,380 investments by 1,852 LPs in 1,250 buyout and venture funds started between 1991 and 2006, we find that the superior performance of endowment investors in the 1991-1998 period,...

Since emerging as a capital destination in the late 1990s, the experience of venture capital (VC) in clean energy technologies (CET) has been checkered. Haphazard investment activity in the early 2000s paired with high-profile failures of once-promising CET ventures to produce a general...

We provide evidence on the value of patents to startups by leveraging the quasi-random assignment of applications to examiners with different propensities to grant patents. Using unique data on all first-time applications filed at the U.S. Patent Office since 2001, we find that startups that win...