Entrepreneurship research is on the rise but many questions about the fundamental nature of entrepreneurship still exist. We argue that entrepreneurship is about experimentation; the probabilities of success are low, extremely skewed, and unknowable until an investment is made. At a macro level,...

Equity overvaluation is thought to create the potential for managerial misbehavior, while monitoring and corporate governance curb misbehavior. We combine these two insights from the literatures on misvaluation and governance to ask 'when does governance matter?' Examining firms with standard...

Entrepreneurship research is on the rise but many questions about its fundamental nature still exist. We argue that entrepreneurship is about experimentation: the probabilities of success are low, extremely skewed and unknowable until an investment is made. At a macro level experimentation by...

This paper investigates whether individual venture capitalists have repeatable investment skill and to what extent their skill is impacted by the VC firm where they work. We examine a unique dataset that tracks the performance of individual venture capitalists' investments across time and as...

Mergers are the mechanisms that redraw the boundaries of the firm. In this paper, we relate incomplete contracts, upon which much of our understanding of firm boundaries is based, to empirical regularities in the market for mergers and acquisitions. We begin by empirically challenging...

We relate the property rights theory of the firm to empirical regularities in the market for mergers and acquisitions. We first show that high market-to-book acquirers typically do not purchase low market-to-book targets. Instead, mergers pair together firms with similar ratios. We then build a...

Does valuation affect mergers? Data suggest that periods of stock merger activity are correlated with high market valuations. The naïve explanation that overvalued bidders wish to use stock is incomplete because targets should not be eager to accept stock. However, we show that potential market...

Price improvement refers to the practice whereby dealers offer executions that improve on quoted prices. Why are these improvements given? Standard thinking is that competition causes dealers to give better prices to customers with less information. This paper contrasts this with a novel theory...