We assess whether a VC’s intrinsic commitment to a startup affects investment performance. We proxy for climate change commitment using the political contributions to democrats of the lead VC person on a deal. We find investments by democrats in climate-related startups have 8% higher...

Using a unique setting in China, where the geographic distance between Collective firms and local governments is highly persistent due to legal restrictions on land ownership and mobility, we investigate the role of government involvement in small firms. In the analysis of survey responses, we...

Small business size standards increased considerably in the United States since 2002. Following their staggered introduction across industries, we find lower shares of small businesses in industry establishments and employment and declines in job creation and business formation. Consequently,...

This paper provides novel evidence that corporate political influence operates through renegotiations of existing government contracts. Using detailed data on contractual terms and renegotiations around sudden deaths and resignations of local politicians, the estimates show that politically...

We compare CEO turnover in public and large private firms. Public firms have higher turnover rates and exhibit greater turnover-performance sensitivities than private firms. Controlling for pre-turnover performance, performance improvements are greater for private firms than for public firms. We...

We test whether the well-documented high returns of private equity sponsors result from wealth transfers from other financial claimants and counterparties and from a focus on short-term profits at the expense of long-term value. Debt investors who finance buyouts, as well as buyers of private...

This paper presents a novel approach to measure firm-level labor-shortage exposure by leveraging finance-specialized machine learning techniques. Specifically, we use FinBERT to extract information from earnings conference call transcripts to develop a reliable measure of labor-shortage...