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 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...

I show that VCs frequently have the right to veto specific operational and financial decisions even though they are equity investors with access to other powerful governance mechanisms. Across 182 first-round U.S. venture capital investments, restrictive covenants are commonplace with 92 percent...

Despite the central role played by human capital in entrepreneurship, little is known about how employees in entrepreneurial firms are compensated and incentivized. We address this gap in the literature by studying 18,935 non-CEO compensation contracts across 1,809 privately-held venture-backed...