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...

We provide a model of investment into new ventures that demonstrates why some places, times and industries should be associated with a greater degree of experimentation by investors. Investors respond to financing risk ― a forecast of limited future funding ― by modifying their focus to...

We find that VC-backed firms receiving their initial investment in hot markets are less likely to IPO, 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 more...

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...

Entrepreneurship research is on the rise but many questions about the fundamental nature of entrepreneurship still exist. We argue that entrepreneurship is about experimentation; the probabilities of success are low, extremely skewed, and unknowable until an investment is made. At a macro level,...

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...