There has been a recent surge of interest in open source software development, which involves developers at many different locations and organizations sharing code to develop and refine programs. To an economist, the behavior of individual programmers and commercial companies engaged in open...

This paper examines the direct private equity investment strategies across sovereign wealth funds and their relationship to the funds' organizational structures. SWFs seem to engage in a form of trend chasing, since they are more likely to invest at home when domestic equity prices are higher,...

The sub-prime crisis has shown a harsh spotlight on the practices of securities underwriters, which provided too many complex securities that proved to ultimately have little value. This uproar calls attention to the fact that the literature on intermediaries has carefully analyzed their...

Since the 2008-09 global financial crises, interest among policy makers in promoting innovative, high-potential ventures has exploded. The emerging great hubs of entrepreneurial activity, like Bangalore, Dubai, Shanghai, Silicon Valley, Singapore, and Tel Aviv, bear the unmistakable stamp of the...

This paper is an initial exploration of the determinants of open source license choice. It first enumerates the various considerations that should figure into the licensor's choice of contractual terms, in particular highlighting how the decision is shaped not just by the preferences of the...

This paper examines the structure of over 100 alliances by Internet portals from 1995 to 1999. These alliances were an attractive empirical testing ground because of the large number and heterogeneous nature of the contracts, the high standards for disclosure in the industry, and the careful...

While the variability of public equity financing has been long recognized, its impact on firms has attracted little empirical scrutiny. This paper examines one setting where theory suggests that variations in financing conditions should matter, alliances between small Ramp;D firms and major...

We examine the determinants of venture capital fundraising in the U.S. over the past twenty-five years. We study industry aggregate, state-level, and firm-specific fundraising to determine if macroeconomic, regulatory, or performance factors affect venture capital activity. We find that shifts...

While policymakers often assume venture capital has a profound impact on innovation, that premise has not been evaluated systematically. We address this omission by examining the influence of venture capital on patented inventions in the United States across twenty industries over three decades....

The pervasiveness of research agreements between pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies is puzzling, since it is hard to contract on the exact nature of the research activities. A major concern of financing companies is that the Ramp;D firms use their funding to subsidize other projects or...