Paper Title: “From Competitors to Partners: Banks’ Venture Investments in Fintech”

We hypothesize and find evidence that banks use financial investments in fintech startups
as 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 make venture investments in fintech
startups. Banks target fintech firms that exhibit higher levels of asset complementarities
with their own business. Finally, our instrumental variable analyses show that financial
investments result in increased probabilities of operational collaborations and knowledge
transfer between the investing bank and the fintech investee.

Presenter: Yiming Qian (UConn)

Coauthors: Manju Puri (Duke) and Xiang Zheng (Uconn)

Discussant: Paul H. Beaumont (McGill)

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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 profitability and the likelihood of securing investment. However, founders, particularly those with ESG focus, favor social VCs partially due to their social preferences. A novel payment game experiment further confirms the existence of founders’ ESG preference in their fundraising endeavors. Lastly, there exist substantial heterogeneous effects based on founders’ political affiliations, industry backgrounds, investor gender, and market conditions.

Presenter: Ye Zhang (SSE)

Coauthors: 

Discussant: Emanuele Colonelli (Booth)

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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 importance of mega firms in novel patents had been declining until about 2000, it has strongly rebounded since then. The timing of this turnaround coincided with the ascendance of firms that newly became mega firms in the 2000s, and a shift in the technological contents, characterized by increasing integration of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and non-ICT components. Mega firms also generate a disproportionately large number of “hits”—novel patents that lead to the largest numbers of follow-on patents (subsequent patents that use the same combinations of technology components as the first novel patent)—and their hits tend to generate more follow-on patents assigned to other firms when compared to hits generated by non-mega firms. Overall, our findings suggest that mega firms play an increasingly important role in generating new technological trajectories in recent years, especially in combining ICT with non-ICT components.

Presenter: Yuheng Ding (World Bank)

Coauthors: Serguey Braguinsky, Joonkyu Choi, Karam Jo & Seula Kim

Discussant: Tim Simcoe (Boston Univ.)

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TBA

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 with randomized attributes induce different research strategies. Longer grants increase researchers’ willingness to take risks, but only amongst tenured professors, suggesting that job security and grant duration are complementary incentives. Larger grants increase researchers’ willingness to expand ongoing projects, while smaller grants increase researchers’ focus on starting new projects. In our second experiment, we estimate researchers’ willingness to trade off grant size and duration. We find that researchers are relatively unwilling to trade off the amount of funding a grant provides in order to extend the duration of the grant — more money is much more valuable than more time.

Presenter: Wei Yang Tham (Harvard)

Coauthors: Kyle Myers (Harvard)

Discussant: Carolyn Stein (UC Berkeley)

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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 junior securities held by mutual funds, implying that mutual funds mark junior securities close to par with the senior securities. Our findings are robust to model assumptions. Identical valuations reported for dual holdings of senior and junior securities imply 37% discrepancy in implied values of the firm. Overvaluation is lower for fund families with longer experience in private startup investments, and higher for junior securities purchased in secondary transactions. Overvaluation declines after down rounds (new financing rounds with purchase prices lower than previous rounds) and near IPOs. The results are consistent with mutual funds neglecting the probability of negative outcomes in which junior securities are paid less than senior securities and overweighting successful exits where all securities convert to common equity and are valued equally.

Presenter: Ayako Yasuda (UC Davis)

Coauthors: Vikas Agarwal, Brad M. Barber, Si Cheng, Allaudeen Hameed and Harshini Shanker

Discussant: Minmo Gahng (Cornell)

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