Venture capital investment performance data and performance attribution are not typically published. Venture investors articulate (and sell to LPs) conflicting strategies; the popular business literature and culture is rife with rapidly changing beliefs about the relative attractiveness of...

This paper studies how exclusive social groups shape upward mobility, and whether interactions between low- and high-status peers can integrate the top rungs of the economic and social ladder. Our setting is Harvard in the 1920s and 1930s, where new groups of students arriving on campus...

Academic seminars are a rather recent invention. Among the seminars that flourished at Harvard during the late 1920s and early 1930s, one played a major role in creating what Margaret Gilbert (1989, 2000) calls a “joint commitment” of its members. Organized by Lawrence J. Henderson, it was...