Empirical Essays on Price Discovery Through Venture Capital Investments
Abstract
In the first chapter I examine the effect of syndication among venture capital (VC) funds on the funds’ incentives to manipulate their performance measures. I show that the presence of new syndicate partners reduces misreporting by VC funds. About half of the reduction in manipulation is during the follow-on fundraising period. To identify that syndicate partners reduce performance misreporting I use: (i) a triple-difference approach around fundraising and (ii)availability-of-syndicate-partners as an instrument for the number of new syndicate partners. The implications of my findings are that LPs should better monitor VC funds with fewer new syndicate partners and regulators should consider the presence of peer-monitoring among VC funds before imposing disclosure requirements.Chapter two includes John J. McConnell, Timothy E. Trombley, and M. Deniz Yavuz as coauthors. In this chapter we report evidence consistent with institutional investors using industry-level information that they obtain from their investments in venture capital (VC) funds to earn excess returns in publicly-traded equities. We use court rulings regarding the Freedom of Information Act as an exogenous shock affecting the information flow between VC firms and institutional investors to show that the excess returns are explained by information received via this channel. Thus, institutional investors serve as conduits of information, making publicly-traded stock prices more efficient. In the process, institutional investors earn higher returns from their VC investments than implied by the cash flows thereby received.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Yavuz, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Finance|Management
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