The treatment of foreign investors has been a contentious topic in U.S. entrepreneurship policy in recent years. This paper examines foreign corporate investments in Silicon Valley from a theoretical and empirical perspective. We model a setting where such funding may allow U.S. entrepreneurs to...

We document political sentiment effects on US inventors. Democratic inventors are more likely to patent (relative to Republicans) after the 2008 election of Obama but less likely after the 2016 election of Trump. These effects are 2-3 times as strong among politically active partisans and are...

Nominal stock prices are arbitrary. Therefore, when evaluating how a piece of news should affect the price of a stock, rational investors should think in percentage rather than dollar terms. However, dollar price changes are ubiquitously reported and discussed. This may both cause and reflect a...

Although late-stage venture capital (VC) activity did not change dramatically in the first two months after the COVID-19 pandemic reached the U.S., early-stage VC activity declined by 38%. The particular sensitivity of early-stage VC investment to market conditions--which we show to be common...

This paper investigates how economic downturns affect the flow of human capital to startups. Using proprietary data from AngelList Talent, we study how individuals' online job searches and applications changed during the emergence of the COVID-19 crisis. We find that job seekers shifted their...

We analyze a field experiment conducted on AngelList Talent, a large online search platform for startup jobs. In the experiment, AngelList randomly informed job seekers of whether a startup was funded by a top-tier investor and/or was funded recently. We find that the same startup receives...

This paper analyzes the importance of household perceptions of house price risk in explaining homeownership choice. While a majority of US households (71%) believes that housing is a "safe" investment, renters are much more likely to perceive housing as risky. Risk perceptions vary across...

This paper addresses two critiques by Mian and Sufi (2015a, 2015b) that were released in response to the results documented in Adelino, Schoar and Severino (2015). We confirm that none of the results in our previous paper are affected by the issues put forward in these critiques; in particular...

We provide new facts on the debt dynamics leading up to the financial crisis of 2007. Earlier research suggests that distortions in the supply of mortgage credit, evidenced by a decoupling of credit flow from income growth, may have caused the rise in house prices and the subsequent housing...

This paper documents the role of the collateral lending channel to facilitate small business starts and self-employment in the period before the financial crisis of 2008. We document that between 2002 and 2007 areas with a bigger run up in house prices experienced a strong increase in employment...