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,...

Women entrepreneurs are known not only to reimburse loans swifter than men, but also to receive smaller loans. However, on average women have smaller-scope business projects and are poorer than men. A deeper investigation is thus required in order to assess the existence of gender discrimination...

We examine the performance of startups co-founded by immigrant and native teams. Leveraging unique data linking startups to founders' and employees' employment and education histories, we find native-migrant teams outperform native-only and migrant-only teams. Native-migrant startups have larger...

It is well documented venture capital’s positive impact on creation and development of highly successful innovative companies worldwide. Venture capital not only provides funding to startups and SMEs (small and medium enterprises) that usually have financing gap, especially in emerging...

We study gender and race in high-impact entrepreneurship using a tightly controlled randomized field experiment. We sent out 80,000 pitch emails introducing promising but fictitious start-ups to 28,000 venture capitalists and angels. Each email was sent by a fictitious entrepreneur with randomly...

We explain the coexistence of different financiers like Venture Capital (VC) and Angel investors and study the role of policymakers in promoting innovation. VC investors are better informed. However, Angel investors offer entrepreneurs a better avenue to capture entrepreneurs' motivational...

We examine the dynamics of the positive sorting in the venture capital industry. We empirically show that there is considerable re-balancing of the VC-company matches. We further find that higher-quality companies associated with less reputable VCs are more likely to switch to more reputable...

We study how entrepreneurs evaluate the ability of different U.S. venture capitalists (VCs) to add value to start-up companies. Analyzing a large dataset on entrepreneurs' stated preferences on VCs, we show that entrepreneurs view independent partnership VCs more favorably than other VC types...

Using hand-collected data on the backgrounds of venture capitalists (VCs), we show that in a typical venture capital firm in our sample, 13.9% of VCs have been entrepreneurs before becoming a VC, referred to as entrepreneur VCs. Both OLS and 2SLS analyses suggest that venture capital firms...

The aim of this paper is to better understand how entrepreneurial equity finance interacts with the complex growth process of young technological ventures. More specially, we investigate how different growth paths are influenced by the entrepreneurs' interactions with different categories of...