This paper examines the dynamics trade-off financial structure in presence of ownership dispersion of newly created firms. Our objective is to test empirically the relevance of trade-off theory regards the debt funding behavior of business start-up. We use a sample of 200 business start-ups and...

The U.S. entrepreneurial finance market has changed dramatically over the last two decades. Entrepreneurs raising their first round of venture capital retain 30% more equity in their firm and are more likely to control their board of directors. Late-stage startups are raising larger amounts of...

In emerging markets, the deviation between the ultimate controlling shareholders' voting rights and their cash flow rights (hereafter “DVC”) in the listed firms is quite prevalent. DVC could be introduced due to the ultimate controlling shareholders' opportunistic incentives, as well as by...

This paper examines how ownership characteristics affect the performance of small and medium technology startups in Russia. We focus on how different types of owners (e.g. founders, state, venture capital and corporate firms) contribute to startup performance. Using an unbalanced panel of...

This study documents that manager-shareholder conflict plays an important role at the earliest stage of business formation. Using data on closely held start-up firms, we focus on the owner who has the greatest managerial responsibility in the firm. Controlling for the endogenous relation between...

We employ agency theory to argue that the effects of family (and founder) ownership vs. management will be quite different: the former is expected to contribute positively to performance, the latter is argued to erode performance. Previous studies, due to problems of multicollinearity have been...