Why do some start-up firms raise funds from banks and others from venture capitalists? To address this question, I study a model in which the venture capitalist can evaluate the entrepreneur's project more accurately than the bank but can also threaten to steal it from the entrepreneur....

We study the decision of an established firm to commercialize innovations. An innovation can be exploited by the established firm as an internal venture, pursued by a new firm start-up as an external venture, or not commercialized at all. The limited commercialization capacity of the established...

Why are contracts not fully indexed? In a setting in which fully indexed contracts are feasible, we find that when price-level data are gathered with delay, these contracts are not renegotiation-proof. The contracts that replace them entail a lower level of welfare for the parties to that...

This paper develops a model of R&D with firms' life-cycles. When a young firm creates new knowledge, the firm may hesitate to implement the knowledge because it is hard to predict if the implementation will be successful. Nevertheless, once the firm implements the knowledge successfully (and...