Does local innovation attract venture capital? Using a regime change in the commercialization of university innovation in 1980 that strongly increased university incentives to patent and license discoveries, we document the complement to Kortum and Lerner (2000)’s finding that financing leads...

Implementing a state-of-the-art machine learning technique for causal identification from text data (C-TEXT), we document that patents authored by female inventors are under-cited relative to those authored by males. Relative to what the same patent would be predicted to receive had the lead...

The success of non-pharmaceutical interventions to contain pandemics often depends greatly upon voluntary compliance with government guidelines. What explains variation in voluntary compliance? Using mobile phone and survey data, we show that during the early phases of COVID-19, voluntary social...

Many financial markets are characterized by strong relationships and networks, rather than arm s-length, spot-market transactions. We examine the performance consequences of this organizational choice in the context of relationships established when VCs syndicate portfolio company investments,...

Many financial markets are characterized by strong relationships and networks, rather than arm's-length, spot-market transactions. We examine the performance consequences of this organizational choice in the context of relationships established when VCs syndicate portfolio company investments....

We evaluate the net benefits of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) for shareholders by studying the lobbying behavior of investors and corporate insiders to affect the final implemented rules under the Act. Investors lobbied overwhelmingly in favor of strict implementation of SOX, while corporate...

Recent studies suggest that the underperformance of IPOs in the post-1970 sample may be a small sample effect or %u201CPeso%u201D problem. That is, IPO underperformance may result from observing too few star performers ex-post than were expected ex-ante. We develop a model of IPO performance...