WEFI

Register for Lindsey Raymond's seminar, April 15th

WEFI

Yiming Qian (UConn)

Paper Title: “From Competitors to Partners: Banks’ Venture Investments in Fintech” We hypothesize and find evidence that banks use financial investments in fintech startupsas a strategic approach to navigate fintech competition. We first document that banks’venture investments have increasingly focused on fintech firms. We find that banks fac-ing greater fintech competition are more likely to …

Ye Zhang (SSE)

Paper Title: Does ESG Investing Help VC Funds to Attract Startups? Experimental Evidence This paper studies how venture capitalists’ (VCs) ESG investments affect startups’ fundraising decisions, using complementary experiments with actual US startup founders. Results reveal the divergent effects of E and S. Founders are reluctant to collaborate with environmental VCs due to concerns about …

Yuheng Ding (World Bank)

Paper Title: Mega Firms and Recent Trends in the U.S. Innovation: Empirical Evidence from the U.S. Patent Data We use the U.S. patent data merged with firm-level datasets to establish new facts about the role of mega firms in generating “novel patents”—innovations that introduce new combinations of technology components for the first time. While the …

Wei Yang Tham (Harvard)

Paper Title: Money, Time, and Grant Design The design of research grants might be a useful tool for incentivizing more socially valuable science. To better understand the value of grant design as a policy instrument, we conduct two sets of thought experiments in a nationally representative survey of academic researchers. First, we test whether grants …

Ayako Yasuda (UC Davis)

September 25, 2023 Paper: Do Investors Overvalue Startups? Evidence from the Junior Stakes of Mutual Funds (pdf) We show that mutual funds report their junior stakes in startups at 43% higher valuation than model fair values that consider multi-tier capital structures of startups. The latest-issued and most senior security is worth 48% per share than …