Federal and state policies in the U.S. subsidize electricity generation from 1.4 million rooftop solar arrays because of pollution avoidance benefits and grid congestion relief. Yet because these benefits vary across the U.S. according to solar irradiance, technologies of electricity generators,...

Private equity performance, both for buyouts and venture capital, has been highly cyclical: periods of high fundraising have been followed by periods of low performance. Despite this seemingly predictable variation, we find modest gains, at best, to pursuing realistic, investable strategies that...

We present new evidence on the persistence of U.S. private equity (buyout and venture capital) funds using cash-flow data sourced from Burgiss's large sample of institutional investors. Previous research, studying largely pre-2000 data, finds strong persistence for both buyout and venture...

Family ownership was rapidly diluted in the twentieth century in Britain. The main cause was equity issued in the process of making acquisitions. In the first half of the century, it occurred in the absence of minority investor protection and relied on directors of target firms protecting the...

We compare sources of funds and investment activities of venture capital (VC) funds in Germany, Israel, Japan and the UK using a newly constructed data set. The data provide a rare opportunity to evaluate relations between funds' sources of finance and activities. We find that sources of VC...

This paper examines means of payment in over 2,500 acquisitions in the UK and US over the period 1955 to 1985. Data on financing proportions, bid premia and postmerger performance are used to test the validity of tax and information hypotheses. It is difficult to explain many of the results in...

We conduct the first field experiment of a performance-contingent microfinance contract. A large food multinational wishes to help micro-distributors in its supply chain with the financing of a productive asset. Working with the firm in Kenya, we compare asset financing under a traditional debt...