Today, roughly 60 percent of home loans are done through mortgage brokers, who negotiate their fees one-on-one with borrowers. Brokers have the advantage of experience and skill, plus information about wholesale terms that are unavailable to the borrowers. Borrowers can pay cash for all...

For alternative assets such as venture capital, buyouts (private equity), real estate, etc., the standard regression of portfolio returns on market returns to measure risk produces risk measures that are not credible. Institutional investors, doubting such measures, instead often use either some...

We describe a new index of the current and historical returns to venture-type capital. The conceptual basis for the index is the value of a continuously reinvested value-weighted portfolio of all venture-backed and similar pre-public companies. It provides a metric for private equity comparable...

We describe a new index of the current and historical returns to venture-type capital. The conceptual basis for the index is the value of a continuously reinvested value-weighted portfolio of all venture-backed and similar pre-public companies. It provides a metric for private equity comparable...

European regulators and pundits grumble that US companies are gobbling up Europe's startups. So far, however, the public discussion remains data-free. The goal here is offer data to illuminate the role of Americans in European venture capital, both as investors in the startups and as buyers of...

This study presents findings on how much borrowers pay in closing costs when they buy a house, how much these costs vary, and factors to which the variation is related. The analysis uses data from a national sample of 7,560 FHA-insured, 30-year fixed-rate home purchase loans. Data were collected...

The standard venture-capital contract rewards entrepreneurs only for creating successful companies that go public or are acquired on favorable terms. As a result, entrepreneurs receive no help from venture capital in avoiding the huge idiosyncratic risk of the typical venture-backed startup....

In the standard venture capital contract, entrepreneurs have a large fraction of equity ownership in the companies they found and are paid a sub-market salary by the investors who provide the money to develop the idea. The big rewards come only to those whose companies go public or are acquired...