We analyze the roles of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists (VC), and the government in financing fundamental innovations, defined as those with positive social value net of development costs, but negative net present values to innovating firms. We first analyze the case where the entrepreneur,...

We theoretically analyze the editorial process in scientific journals. In our model, a journal editor maximizes his journal's expected payoff from publishing high quality papers, net of costs due to (mistakenly) publishing low quality papers. The editor, with a prior probability assessment...

We analyze the dynamics of private firms' exit choice between IPOs and acquisitions and the valuation premium of IPOs over acquisitions from pre-2000 to post-2000. We first develop a two-period theoretical model, where in each period, entrepreneurs with private information about the viability of...

We analyze the optimality of allowing disclosures of different types of information before equity offerings and of alternative rules for private securities litigation, where courts may penalize unduly optimistic disclosures ex post. In our model, firm insiders, with private information about...

Using a hand-collected data set of private firm acquisitions and IPOs, this paper develops the first empirical analysis in the literature of the "IPO valuation premium puzzle," which refers to a situation where many private firms choose to be acquired rather than to go public at higher...