The creation and scaling of startups are associated with risk-taking and different types of owners treat these risks differently. We show how an active venture capital (VC) market affects risk-taking in research and scaling decisions of startups. VC-backed startups will choose more high-risk,...

We find that reduced foreign corporate taxes may lead to inefficient foreign acquisitions if complementarities between foreign and domestic assets are low, and to efficient foreign acquisitions if such complementarities are high. Moreover, with large complementarities, foreign acquisitions can...

When should entrepreneurs choose to enter the market with a start-up? And when should they sell their invention or business idea? New research on how entrepreneurs decide between entry and sale offers significant insights for policy makers concerned about economic welfare. At first glance, the...

We propose a management career model where females face a gender-specific career hurdle. We show that female managers will, on average, be more skilled than male managers, since females from the low end of the talent distribution will abstain from investing in a career as a manager. The average...

Elite skills have become crucial in today’s superstar economy. We develop a multi-period skillformation model where we show that individuals with temporary disadvantages must exert greater effort to gain access to elite education. This “underdog-incentive effect” implies that “educated...

We provide a model that explains the following empirical observations: i) private ownership is more efficient than public ownership, ii) privatizations are associated with increases in efficiency and iii) the increase in efficiency predates the privatization. The two key mechanisms explaining...

Private equity backed firms have more leverage, more intense compensation contracts, and higher productivity than comparable non-private equity backed firms. We develop a theory of buyouts in oligopolistic markets that ties these facts to an explicit focus on buying assets with the intent of...