Existing empirical evidence suggests that entrepreneurs are optimists, a finding researchers often interpret as evidence of a behavioral bias in entrepreneurial decision-making. We revisit this claim by analyzing an unusually large survey dataset (180,814 responses) that allows us to create a...

Existing empirical evidence suggests that entrepreneurs are optimists, a finding researchers often interpret as evidence of a behavioral bias in entrepreneurial decision-making. We revisit this claim by analyzing an unusually large survey dataset (180,814 responses) that allows us to create a...

Self-employment is often used as synonymous with entrepreneurship. We define entrepreneurship as having the ambition to grow or innovate. As part of a large and representative survey in Sweden, business owners were asked to self-identify as either entrepreneurs or self-employed. The survey in...

The venture capital market is characterized by personal interactions between VC firms and the startups they finance. Yet we have little systematic evidence of how startup founders get matched with partners at VC firms. By assembling data at the individual partner and founder level, we compare...

We study the evolution and renegotiation of the cash flow rights that venture capitalists (VCs) obtain in their portfolio companies. When company performance between financing rounds is poor, subsequent contracts contain stronger VC cash flow rights, and existing VCs tend to either give new VCs...

We study how entrepreneurs evaluate the ability of different U.S. venture capitalists (VCs) to add value to start-up companies. Analyzing a large dataset on entrepreneurs' stated preferences on VCs, we show that entrepreneurs view independent partnership VCs more favorably than other VC types...

We show that the degree of control exerted by investors over entrepreneurial firms helps explain the design of employee compensation contracts, and in ways that are asymmetric for founders versus hired-on employees. Across 1,809 U.S. venture-backed companies, we find that firms with more VC/less...