This paper measures the expected return, mean, standard deviation, alpha, and beta of venture capital investments. The focus of the paper is correcting for the selection bias that is the central obstacle in evaluating such investments. Therefore, valuations are observed only when a firm goes...

Performance evaluation of venture-capital (VC) payoffs is challenging because payoffs are infrequent, skewed, realized over endogenously varying time horizons, and cross- sectionally dependent. We show that standard stochastic discount factor (SDF) methods can be adapted to handle these issues....

We provide a model that links the high return to venture equity to the impatience of the VCs. VCs are scarce, and hence, they have market power and a high return on their investments. As a result, VCs are eager to terminate non-performing ventures so they can move on to new ones. The scarcity of...

Typically, studies of efforts of economic agents do not distinguish between efforts that directly generate returns (`return effort') and efforts that facilitate demonstration of return effort, that is, `return effort cost'. This study provides formal theoretical evidence that a distinguishing of...

During contract negotiations with a startup, a venture capitalist (VC) can receive preferred stock and additional cash flow rights, which result in a higher return than that of common stock. Incorporation of contract terms into the payoff to investor calculation not only changes the...