This paper examines whether agency conflicts during venture capital (VC) fundraising impact investment behavior. Using novel investment-level decisions of VCs in the process of raising new funds, we find that venture capitalists take actions hidden from their investors, i.e. limited partners...

A model of racial discrimination provides testable implications for two features of statistical discriminators: differential treatment of signals by race and heterogeneous experience that shapes perception. We construct an experiment in the U.S. rental apartment market that distinguishes...

Venture capital firms’ ability to repeatedly make top performing investments suggests the importance of some aspect of organizational or human capital. However, it is an unanswered question as to what extent the important attributes of performance are a part of the firm’s organizational...

This paper explores the venture capital (VC) market and extends the standard principal-agent problem between the investor and venture capitalist to show how it alters the interaction between the venture capitalist and the entrepreneur. The nature of the three way interaction results in a...

Economic frictions pervade the founding, financing, growing, and exiting of high-growth entrepreneurial firms. This article considers one friction that currently affects a small, but important, set of entrepreneurs: racial and gender discrimination. I first collect facts from a large empirical...

I investigate: (i) Agency problems between debt and equity holders, and their impact on capital structure and investment policy; (ii) Agency problems between firm managers and capital providers. The first chapter, "Investment and Financing under Reverse Asset Substitution", shows that banks...