We study the compensation earned by CEOs in private venture-backed firms. We extend the traditional view of pay-for-performance by proposing that the economic characteristics of startups and venture capital markets interact in such a way that CEOs will be rewarded for successfully raising new...

This study explores the roles that three kinds of nonfinancial variables - people, patents and policies - play in generating firms' near-term annual sales revenue. Due to data limitations on these variables for public companies, I use a rich and detailed set of information taken from surveys of...

Using a large quasi-time-series dataset, this paper describes and analyzes how a wide range of the economic characteristics of venture-backed firms change as such firms mature through their private, pre-exit stages of life. Three patterns emerge that I interpret as being consistent with a...

I propose that pre-IPO venture-backed biotech companies offer a productive new setting through which to discriminate among theories of why firm size and book-to-market explain variation in expected stock returns. This is because pre-IPO biotech firms have large and rapidly evolving growth...

This study explores the value relevance of financial statements in private equity markets, and compares the value relevance of financial statements to that of non-financial statement information within and across private and public equity markets. For a sample of U.S. biotechnology firms, I find...

This paper sheds light on how and why the stock market values high technology by examining the pricing of 606 biotechnology firms that were publicly traded at some time during the period 1989:q1-2000:q3. Contrary to the common view that the primary value drivers of biotechnology are...

In this paper I measure the importance of three groups of factors in the pricing of U.S. Internet stocks: economic fundamentals, web traffic, and supply and demand forces. Using log-linear regression on a panel of data for Net and non-Net stocks on 2/1/2000, I highlight five findings. First,...

This paper sheds light on the economics of Internet firms by extracting information on major value-drivers from their stock prices. Contrary to conventional Wall Street wisdom that there is little or no method in the pricing of Net stocks, I find that basic accounting data are highly...

This study investigates the impacts on the equity values of private venture-backed firms of the organizational depth to which they grant employee stock options. I develop two hypotheses. First, applying the reasoning of Demsetz and Lehn (1985), I propose that firms' equity values will be...

This study uses out-of-sample equity value estimates to determine whether earnings disaggregation, imposing valuation model linear information (LIM) structure, and separate industry estimation of valuation model parameters aid in predicting contemporaneous equity values. We consider three levels...