We use a new data set that tracks U.S. firms from their birth over two decades to understand the life cycle dynamics and outcomes (both successes and failures) of VC- and non-VC financed firms. We first ask to what market-wide and firm-level characteristics venture capitalists respond in choosing to make their investments and how this differs for firms financed solely by non-VC sources of entrepreneurial capital. We then ask what are the eventual differences in outcomes for firms that receive VC financing relative to non-VC-financed firms. Our findings suggest that VCs follow public market signals similar to other investors and typically invest largely in young firms, with potential for large scale being an important criterion. The main way that VC financed firms differ from matched non-VC financed firms, is they demonstrate remarkably larger scale both for successful and failed firms, at every point of the firms' life cycle. They grow more rapidly, but we see little difference in profitability measures at times of exit. We further examine a number of hypotheses relating to VC-financed firms' failure. We find that VC-financed firms' cumulative failure rates are lower than non-VC-financed firms but the story is nuanced. VC appears initially 'patient' in that VC-financed firms are less likely to fail in the first five years but conditional on surviving past this point become more likely to fail relative to non-VC-financed firms. We perform a number of robustness checks and find that VC does not appear to have more stringent survival thresholds nor do VC-financed firm failures appear to be disguised as acquisitions nor do particular kinds of VC firms seem to be driving our results. Overall, our analysis supports the view that VC is 'patient' capital relative to other non-VC sources of entrepreneurial capital in the early part of firms' lifecycles and that an important criterion for receiving VC investment is potential for large scale, rather than level of profitability, prior to exit.
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The Disappearing IPO Puzzle: New Insights from Proprietary U.S. Census Data on Private Firms
June 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-20
The U.S. equity markets have experienced a remarkable decline in IPOs since 2000, both in terms of smaller IPO volume and entrepreneurial firms' greater tendency to exit through acquisitions rather than IPOs. Using proprietary U.S. Census data on private firms, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the above two notable trends and provide several new insights. First, we find that the dramatic reduction in U.S. IPOs is not due to a weaker economy that is unable to produce enough 'exit eligible' private firms: in fact, the average total factor productivity (TFP) of private firms is slightly higher post-2000 compared to pre-2000. Second, we do not find evidence supporting the conventional wisdom that the disappearing IPO puzzle is mainly driven by the decline in IPO propensity among small private firms. Third, we do not find a significant change in the characteristics of private firms exiting through acquisitions from pre- to post-2000. Fourth, the decline in IPO propensity persists even after we account for the changing characteristics of private firms over time. Fifth, we show that the difference in TFP between IPO firms and acquired firms (and between IPO firms and firms remaining private) went up considerably post-2000 compared to pre-2000. Finally, venture-capital-backed (VC-backed) IPO firms have significantly lower postexit long-term TFP than matched VC-backed private firms in the post-2000 era relative to the pre- 2000 era, while this pattern is absent among IPO and matched private firms without VC backing. Overall, our results strongly support the explanations based on standalone public firms' greater sensitivity to product market competition and entrepreneurial firms' access to more abundant private equity financing in the post-2000 era. We find mixed evidence regarding the explanations based on the smaller net financial benefits of being standalone public firms or the increased need for confidentiality after 2000.
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Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship
April 2018
Working Paper Number:
carra-2018-03
Many observers, and many investors, believe that young people are especially likely to produce the most successful new firms. We use administrative data at the U.S. Census Bureau to study the ages of founders of growth-oriented start-ups in the past decade. Our primary finding is that successful entrepreneurs are middle-aged, not young. The mean founder age for the 1 in 1,000 fastest growing new ventures is 45.0. The findings are broadly similar when considering high-technology sectors, entrepreneurial hubs, and successful firm exits. Prior experience in the specific industry predicts much greater rates of entrepreneurial success. These findings strongly reject common hypotheses that emphasize youth as a key trait of successful entrepreneurs.
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Who Works for Startups? The Relation between Firm Age, Employee Age, and Growth
October 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-31
We present evidence that young employees are an important ingredient in the creation and growth of firms. Our results suggest that young employees possess attributes or skills, such as willingness to take risk or innovativeness, which make them relatively more valuable in young, high growth, firms. Young firms disproportionately hire young employees, controlling for firm size, industry, geography and time. Young employees in young firms command higher wages than young employees in older firms and earn wages that are relatively more equal to older employees within the same firm. Moreover, young employees disproportionately join young firms that subsequently exhibit higher growth and raise venture capital financing. Finally, we show that an increase in the regional supply of young workers increases the rate of new firm creation. Our results are relevant for investors and executives in young, high growth, firms, as well as policymakers interested in fostering entrepreneurship.
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The Going Public Decision and the Product Market
July 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-20
At what point in a firm's life should it go public? How do a firm's ex ante product market characteristics relate to its going public decision? Further, what are the implications of a firm going public on its post-IPO operating and product market performance? In this paper, we answer the above questions by conducting the first large sample study of the going public decisions of U.S. firms in the literature. We use the Longitudinal Research Database (LRD) of the U.S. Census Bureau, which covers the entire universe of private and public U.S. manufacturing firms. Our findings can be summarized as follows. First, a private firm's product market characteristics (market share, competition, capital intensity, cash flow riskiness) significantly affect its likelihood of going public. Second, private firms facing less information asymmetry and those with projects that are cheaper for outsiders to evaluate are more likely to go public (consistent with Chemmanur and Fulghieri (1999)). Third, IPOs of firms occur at the peak of their productivity cycle (consistent with Clementi (2002)): the dynamics of total factor productivity (TFP) and sales growth exhibit an inverted U-shaped pattern. Finally, sales, capital expenditures, and other performance variables exhibit a consistently increasing pattern over the years before and after the IPO. The last two findings are consistent with the widely documented post-IPO operating underperformance of firms being due to the real investment effects of a firm going public, and inconsistent with underperformance being solely due to earnings management immediately prior to the IPO.
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R&D or R vs. D?
Firm Innovation Strategy and Equity Ownership
April 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-14
We analyze a unique dataset that separately reports research and development expenditures
for a large panel of public and private firms. Definitions of 'research' and 'development' in this dataset, respectively, correspond to definitions of knowledge 'exploration' and 'exploitation' in the innovation theory literature. We can thus test theories of how equity ownership status relates to innovation strategy. We find that public firms have greater research intensity than private firms, inconsistent with theories asserting private ownership is more conducive to exploration. We also find public firms invest more intensely in innovation of all sorts. These results suggest relaxed financing constraints enjoyed by public firms, as well as their diversified shareholder bases, make them more conducive to investing in all types of innovation. Reconciling several seemingly conflicting results in prior research, we find private-equity-owned firms, though not less innovative overall than other private firms, skew their innovation strategies toward development and away from research.
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Nature Versus Nurture in the Origins of Highly Productive Businesses: An Exploratory Analysis of U.S. Manufacturing Establishments
September 2011
Working Paper Number:
CES-11-26
This paper investigates the origins of productivity leaders, those that operate close to and help push out the production frontier. Do such businesses emerge as top performers from the very beginning of their lives, for example as the consequence of an outstanding founding idea, technology, or location? Or, at the other extreme, do they appear initially as completely average (or even underperformers) that exhibit gradual improvement as they learn and develop with age? To answer this question we draw upon five decades of U.S. Census of Manufacturing (CM) establishment-level data, tracing the productivity leaders of the most recent CM (2007) back over their observed life spans. We also examine possible industry-level correlates of variation in the extent of nature versus nurture that are suggested by theories of industry dynamics and economic growth.
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Going Entrepreneurial? IPOs and New Firm Creation
January 2017
Working Paper Number:
CES-17-18
Using matched employee-employer US Census data, we examine the effect of a successful initial public offering (IPO) on employee departures to startups. Accounting for the endogeneity of a firm's choice to go public, we find strong evidence that going public induces employees to leave for start-ups. Moreover, we document that the increase in turnover following an IPO is driven by employees departing to start-ups; we find no change in the rate of employee departures for established firms. We present evidence that, following an IPO, many employees who received stock grants experience a positive shock to their wealth which allows them to better tolerate the risks associated with joining a startup or to obtain funding. Our results suggest that the recent declines in IPO activity and new firm creation in the US may be causally linked. The recent decline in IPOs means fewer workers may move to startups, decreasing overall new firm creation in the economy.
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Leveraged Payouts: How Using New Debt to Pay Returns in Private Equity Affects Firms, Employees, Creditors, and Investors
January 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-12
We study the causal effect of a large increase in firm leverage. Our setting is dividend recapitalizations in private equity (PE), where portfolio companies take on new debt to pay investor returns. After accounting for positive selection into more debt, we show that large leverage increases make firms much riskier, dramatically raising exit and bankruptcy rates but also IPOs. The debt-bankruptcy relationship is in line with Altman-Z model predictions for private firms. Dividend recapitalizations increase deal returns but reduce: (a) wages among surviving firms; (b) pre-existing loan prices; and (c) fund returns, which seems to reflect moral hazard via new fundraising. These results suggest negative implications for employees, pre-existing creditors, and investors.
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The Real Effects of Hedge Fund Activism: Productivity, Risk, and Product Market Competition
July 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-14
This paper studies the long-term effect of hedge fund activism on the productivity of target firms using plant-level information from the U.S. Census Bureau. A typical target firm improves its production efficiency within two years after activism, and this improvement is concentrated in industries with a high degree of product market competition. By following plants that were sold post-intervention, we also find that efficient capital redeployment is an important channel via which activists create value. Furthermore, our analyses demonstrate that measuring performance using the Compustat data is likely to lead to a downward bias because target firms experiencing greater improvement post-intervention are also more likely to disappear from the Compustat database. Finally, consistent with recent work in asset-pricing linking firm investment decisions and expected returns, we show how changes to target firms' productivity are associated with a decline in systemic risk, particularly in competitive industries.
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Do SBA Loans Create Jobs? Estimates from Universal Panel Data and Longitudinal Matching Methods
September 2012
Working Paper Number:
CES-12-27
This pape reports estimates of the effects of the Small Business Administration (SBA) 7(a) and 504 loan programs on employment. The database links a complete list of all SBA loans in these programs to universal data on all employers in the U.S. economy from 1976 to 2010. Our method is to estimate firm fixed effect regressions using matched control groups for the SBA loan recipients we have constructed by matching exactly on firm age, industry, year, and pre-loan size, plus kernel-based matching on propensity scores estimated as a function of four years of employment history and other variables. The results imply positive average effects on loan recipient employment of about 25 percent or 3 jobs at the mean. Including loan amount, we find little or no impact of loan receipt per se, but an increase of about 5.4 jobs for each million dollars of loans. When focusing on loan recipients and control firms located in high-growth counties (average growth of 22 percent), places where most small firms should have excellent growth potential, we find similar effects, implying that the estimates are not driven by differential demand conditions across firms. Results are also similar regardless of distance of control from recipient firms, suggesting only a very small role for displacement effects. In all these cases, the results pass a "pre-program" specification test, where controls and treated firms look similar in the pre-loan period. Other specifications, such as those using only matching or only regression imply somewhat higher effects, but they fail the pre-program test.
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