We analyze the roles of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists (VC), and the government in financing fundamental innovations, defined as those with positive social value net of development costs, but negative net present values to innovating firms. We first analyze the case where the entrepreneur,...

We hypothesize that VC-backing garners greater “investor attention” (Merton (1987)) for IPOs, allowing IPO underwriters to perform two information-related roles more efficiently during the book-building and road-show process: information dissemination, where the lead underwriter disseminates...

We make use of hand-collected data on a large sample of entrepreneurial firms to analyze the effect of venture capital (VC) backing on the management quality of firms going public and the effect of both VC-backing and management quality on IPO variables. We hypothesize that VC-backing will be...

We analyze the role of trademarks in entrepreneurial finance, hypothesizing that trademarks play two important roles: a “protective” role, leading to better product market performance; and an “informational” role, signaling higher firm quality to investors. We develop testable hypotheses...

We analyze the role of venture capitalists (VCs) in transforming the management and governance of China's private family firms pre-IPO. We show, causally, that VC-backed family firms are more likely than non-VC backed family firms to experience departures of family members from top management...

Institutional investors, collectively the majority shareholders of most publicly traded corporations, play important roles in almost all aspects of corporate finance. This special issue puts together sixteen papers covering a wide range of topics, such as M&As, capital structure, bonds and...

Using a large sample of angel and venture capital (VC) financing data from the Crunchbase and VentureXpert databases and private firm data from the NETS database, we address three important research questions. First, we analyze the relative extent of value addition by angels versus VCs to...