We review the recent literature on the financing of innovation, inclusive of large companies and new startups. This research strand has been very active over the past five years, generating important new findings, questioning some long-held beliefs, and creating its own puzzles. Our review...

We use investment-level data to study performance persistence in venture capital (VC). Consistent with prior studies, we find that each additional IPO among a VC firm's first ten investments predicts as much as an 8% higher IPO rate on its subsequent investments, though this effect erodes with...

By comparing patenting among VC-backed firms to the universe of patents filed in the USPTO over the period 1976-2019, we document that while patents filed by VC backed firms are of significantly higher quality and economic importance than the average patent, VC-backed innovation is substantially...

Past work has shown that failure tolerance by principals has the potential to stimulate innovation, but has not examined how this affects which projects principals will start. We demonstrate that failure tolerance has an equilibrium price ― in terms of an investor's required share of equity...

Most research on the CEO labor market studies public company CEOs while largely ignoring CEOs in private equity (PE) funded companies. We fill this gap by studying the market for CEOs among U.S. companies purchased by PE firms in large leveraged buyout transactions. 71% of those companies hired...

We find that male participants in Harvard Business School's New Venture Competition who were randomly exposed to more VC investors on their panel were substantially more likely to start a VC-backed startup post-graduation, indicating that access to investors impacts fundraising independent of...

We survey 885 institutional venture capitalists (VCs) at 681 firms to learn how they make decisions across eight areas: deal sourcing; investment decisions; valuation; deal structure; post-investment value-added; exits; internal organization of firms; and relationships with limited partners. In...

An extensive literature on venture capital has studied asymmetric information and agency problems between investors and entrepreneurs, examining how separating entrepreneurs from the investor can create frictions that might inhibit the funding of good projects. It has largely abstracted away...

With an overall lack of gender and ethnic diversity in the innovation sector documented in Gompers and Wang (2017), we ask the natural next question: Does increased diversity lead to better firm performances? In this paper, we attempt to answer this question using a unique dataset of the gender...

We document new facts on the evolution of founder-CEO compensation in venture capital-backed startups. Having a tangible product (“product market fit”) is a fundamental milestone in CEOs' compensation, marking the point where liquid cash compensation increases significantly – well before...