"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....

The standard approach to measuring portfolio risk - regressing portfolio returns on market returns - seriously understates the risk of venture capital, buyouts (private equity), real estate, and other alternative assets not traded in active markets. Institutional investors, having a sense of the...

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...

European regulators and pundits grumble that US companies are gobbling up Europe's startups. So far, however, the public discussion remains data-free. The goal here is offer data to illuminate the role of Americans in European venture capital, both as investors in the startups and as buyers of...