We find that VC-backed firms receiving their initial investment in hot markets are more likely to go bankrupt, but conditional on going public are valued higher on the day of their IPO, have more patents and have more citations to their patents. Our results suggest that VCs invest in riskier and...

The VICO project collected a database on young high-tech entrepreneurial companies operating in seven European countries (Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom). The objective of the data collection process was to build a data infrastructure to conduct an...

In the bank-borrower setting, a firm's existing lender may exploit its positional advantage to extract rents from the firm in subsequent financings. Analogously, a startup's existing venture capital investors (VCs) may dilute the founder through a follow-on financing from these same VCs (an...

In his book, 'Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Why Public Efforts to Boost Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Have Failed - and What to Do about It,' Harvard Business School Professor, Josh Lerner, explains that governments can only play a limited role in spurring innovation and entrepreneurship....

This paper empirically examines business starts, deaths, venture capital and patents in relation to U.S. public policy. The most consistent evidence in the data shows that lower levels of labor frictions and higher levels of SBIR awards are associated with more business starts and higher levels...

Although venture capital (VC) exits have been studied for over 20 years, major drivers are still in question. We examine the determinants of exit timing in initial public offerings (IPOs). The results from a proprietary dataset of 292 U.S. VC-backed IPOs from 1991 to 2008 imply that VC firm...

This Article examines a third exit option in venture capital to supplement IPOs and trade sales: secondary markets for the sale of individual ownership interests in start-ups and venture capital (VC) funds. While investors can readily buy shares in publicly-traded companies, until recently they...

This paper empirically examines business starts, deaths, venture capital and patents in relation to U.S. public policy. The most consistent evidence in the data shows that lower levels of labor frictions and higher levels of SBIR awards are associated with more business starts and higher levels...

We examine the dynamics of the positive sorting in the venture capital industry. We empirically show that there is considerable re-balancing of the VC-company matches. We further find that higher-quality companies associated with less reputable VCs are more likely to switch to more reputable...

Venture debt, or loans to rapid-growth start-ups, is a puzzle. How are start-ups with no track records, positive cash flows, tangible collateral, or personal guarantees from entrepreneurs able to attract billions of dollars in loans each year? And why do start-ups take on debt rather than rely...