We use a survey approach to learn about valuation professionals' choices and implementations of valuation techniques in practice. The survey design allows us to control for a respondent's professional subgroup (e.g., consulting), education, experience, and valuation purpose characteristics. We...

We survey 885 institutional venture capitalists (VCs) at 681 firms to learn how they make decisions across eight areas: deal sourcing; investment decisions; valuation; deal structure; post-investment value-added; exits; internal organization of firms; and relationships with limited partners. In...

We define long shots as investment projects with four features: (1) low probabilities of success; (2) long gestation lags before any cash flows are realized; (3) large required up-front investments; and (4) very large payoffs (relative to initial investment) in the unlikely event of success....

The paper analyzes patterns in spatial proximity between venture capital investors and investees. We use a data set of 950 dyads of venture capitalists and German new ventures which have closed a financing round between January 2002 and March 2007. We are the first study to use minimum travel...

In this paper, I extend the results of Moskowitz and Vissing-Jørgensen (2002) on the returns to entrepreneurial investments in the United States. First, following the authors' methodology I replicate the original findings from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) for the period 1989 - 1998 and...

We develop a model of investment, payout, and financing policies in which firms face uncertainty regarding their ability to raise funds and have to search for investors when in need of capital. We show that capital supply uncertainty leads firms to value financial slack and to adjust their...

Equity research analysts tend to cover firms about which they have favorable views. We exploit this tendency to infer analysts' preferences for corporate policies from their coverage decisions. We then use exogenous analyst disappearances to examine the effect of these preferences on corporate...

We explore why venture capital funds limit the amount of capital they raise and do not reinvest the proceeds. This structure is puzzling because it leads to a succession of several funds financing each new venture which multiplies the well known agency problems. We argue that an inside investor...

This article shows that investors financing a portfolio of projects may use the depth of their financial pockets to overcome entrepreneurial incentive problems. Competition for scarce informed capital at the refinancing stage strengthens investors' bargaining positions. And yet, entrepreneurs'...

A common method of valuing the equity in highly leveraged transactions is the flows-to-equity method. When applying this method various formulas can be used to calculate the time-varying cost of equity. In this paper we show that some commonly used formulas are inconsistent with the assumptions...