Recently, the lack of diversity in startup leadership has been criticized by public figures and institutional investors as a signal of inadequate governance. And yet, little is known about the historical changes in gender diversity in entrepreneurial firms. Using a unique database of the gender composition in all entrepreneur-ial firm IPOs from 1990 to 2020 in the USA, we examine these changes. The IPO is a particularly interesting moment in an entrepreneurial firm’s evolution, as governance evolves from a private firm directed by venture capitalists, with their...
In response to new developments in financial structure and technology, and galvanized by recent eruptions of volatility, officials from Washington to London to Brussels are grappling with how to regulate the cluster of practices known as decentralized finance, or DeFi. This is a political as well as an economic question. This is to say, the outcome will involve interests in addition to considerations of efficiency. Although advocates of decentralized finance often invoke laudable goals like reduced costs and increased inclusion, it is worth examining what else rides those coattails.
Patents and brand names are only two examples of a broad category of disembodied assets from which firms derive revenue, referred to as “intangible assets.” Intangible assets pose a challenge for traditional financial valuation models for many reasons. Because intangible assets lack physicality, companies can easily transfer them internally from one subsidiary to another and among different countries. Aside from this difficulty in precisely determining their financial value, companies can use intangible assets as a profit-shifting tool in tax-planning schemes. In the course of their daily...
This essay examines the implications of the evolving environment for the formation and financing of new firms in the United States. After the dot.com crash of 2000, there was a regime change in new firm formation and the number of firms that exited through an initial public stock offering. This change was made possible by the decreased cost, increased speed, and ease of market entry due to availability of open source software, digital platforms, and cloud computing. This facilitated a proliferation of startups seeking to disrupt incumbent firms in a wide variety of business sectors. The...
Venture financing, a form of entrepreneurial finance, has played a central part in the story of the digital revolution. Indeed, Silicon Valley, the global center of the venture capital industry, draws its name from the substrate of the contemporary semiconductor, which is the computational engine for all digital products. The continuing performance improvements characteristic of Moore’s Law provided ever new potentialities for new generations of startups. While improvement in processing power was the core engine for this venture capital-financed entrepreneurship, the new firms were not...