Essays in Entrepreneurial Finance

Abstract

In the first essay, I show that the transition to public equity markets have important implications to firms’ innovative process. To establish a causal effect of the IPO, I compare the long-run innovation of firms that completed their filing and went public with that of firms that withdrew their filing and remained private. I use NASDAQ fluctuations during the book-building period as a source of exogenous variation that affects IPO completion but is unlikely to affect long-run innovation. Using this approach, I find that the quality of internal innovation declines by 50 percent relative to firms that remained private. The decline in innovation is driven by both an exodus of skilled inventors and a decline in productivity among remaining inventors. However, going public allows firms to attract new human capital and purchase externally generated innovations through mergers and acquisitions. In the second essay, we explore the effects of private equity investments on the industries they invest at. This analysis looks across nations and industries to assess the impact of private equity on industry performance. Industries where PE funds have invested in the past five years have grown more quickly in terms of productivity and employment. It is hard to find support for claims that economic activity in industries with private equity backing is more exposed to aggregate shocks. The results using lagged private equity investments suggest that the results are not driven by reverse causality. Finally, in the third essay we model situations in which a principal offers a set of contracts to a group of agents to participate in a project. Agents’ benefits from participation depend on the identity of other participating agents. We show that when assuming multilateral externalities, the optimal contracts’ payoff relies on a ranking of the agents, which can be described as arising from a tournament among the agents. Rather than simply ranking agents according to a measure of popularity, the optimal contracting scheme makes use of a more refined two-way comparison between the agents. We derive results on the principal’s revenue extraction and the role of the level of externalities’ asymmetry.