I find that companies funded by more experienced VCs are more likely to go public. This follows both from the direct influence of more experienced VCs and from sorting in the market, which leads experienced VCs to invest in better companies. Sorting creates an endogeneity problem, but a structural model based on a two-sided matching model is able to exploit the characteristics of the other agents in the market to separately identify and estimate influence and sorting. Both effects are found to be significant, with sorting almost twice as important as influence for the difference in IPO rates. Copyright 2007 by The American Finance Association.

The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

No abstract

A long-standing controversy is whether LBOs relieve managers from short-term pressures from public shareholders, or whether LBO funds themselves are driven by short-term profit motives and sacrifice long-term growth to boost short-term performance. We investigate 495 transactions with a focus on one form of long-term activities, namely investments in innovation as measured by patenting activity. We find no evidence that LBOs are associated with a decrease in these activities. Relying on standard measures of patent quality, we find that patents granted to firms involved in private equity transactions are more cited (a proxy for economic importance), show no significant shifts in the fundamental nature of the research, and are more concentrated in the most important and prominent areas of companies' innovative portfolios.