IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/corfin/v49y2018icp168-185.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Venture capital and career concerns

Author

Listed:
  • Crain, Nicholas G.

Abstract

This paper finds evidence that the market for follow-on capital discourages risk taking by venture capital fund managers. The amount of follow-on capital raised by venture capitalists is concave with respect to current fund performance. In addition, managers with less consistent performance are slower, and less likely, to raise a follow-on fund. Venture capitalists adjust their investment strategy to balance fundraising incentives against the incentive to pursue risk provided by carried interest. The findings are consistent with models of career concerns, where an agent's compensation is designed to (partially) offset the implicit incentives created by future employment opportunities.

Suggested Citation

  • Crain, Nicholas G., 2018. "Venture capital and career concerns," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 49(C), pages 168-185.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:corfin:v:49:y:2018:i:c:p:168-185
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jcorpfin.2017.12.004
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0929119917306752
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jcorpfin.2017.12.004?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Nanda, Ramana & Rhodes-Kropf, Matthew, 2013. "Investment cycles and startup innovation," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 110(2), pages 403-418.
    2. Michelle Lowry & Micah S. Officer & G. William Schwert, 2010. "The Variability of IPO Initial Returns," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 65(2), pages 425-465, April.
    3. Steven N. Kaplan & Antoinette Schoar, 2005. "Private Equity Performance: Returns, Persistence, and Capital Flows," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 60(4), pages 1791-1823, August.
    4. Lerner, Josh & Shane, Hilary & Tsai, Alexander, 2003. "Do equity financing cycles matter? evidence from biotechnology alliances," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 67(3), pages 411-446, March.
    5. Chevalier, Judith & Ellison, Glenn, 1997. "Risk Taking by Mutual Funds as a Response to Incentives," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 105(6), pages 1167-1200, December.
    6. Thomas Hellmann & Manju Puri, 2002. "Venture Capital and the Professionalization of Start‐Up Firms: Empirical Evidence," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 57(1), pages 169-197, February.
    7. Gibbons, Robert & Murphy, Kevin J, 1992. "Optimal Incentive Contracts in the Presence of Career Concerns: Theory and Evidence," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 100(3), pages 468-505, June.
    8. Hellmann, Thomas & Puri, Manju, 2000. "The Interaction between Product Market and Financing Strategy: The Role of Venture Capital," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 13(4), pages 959-984.
    9. Lopez-de-Silanes, Florencio & Phalippou, Ludovic & Gottschalg, Oliver, 2015. "Giants at the Gate: Investment Returns and Diseconomies of Scale in Private Equity," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 50(3), pages 377-411, June.
    10. Harvey, A C, 1976. "Estimating Regression Models with Multiplicative Heteroscedasticity," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 44(3), pages 461-465, May.
    11. Ai, Chunrong & Norton, Edward C., 2003. "Interaction terms in logit and probit models," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 80(1), pages 123-129, July.
    12. Yael V. Hochberg & Alexander Ljungqvist & Annette Vissing-Jørgensen, 2014. "Informational Holdup and Performance Persistence in Venture Capital," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 27(1), pages 102-152, January.
    13. Ji-Woong Chung & Berk A. Sensoy & Léa Stern & Michael S. Weisbach, 2012. "Pay for Performance from Future Fund Flows: The Case of Private Equity," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 25(11), pages 3259-3304.
    14. Stephen J. Brown & William N. Goetzmann & James Park, 2001. "Careers and Survival: Competition and Risk in the Hedge Fund and CTA Industry," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 56(5), pages 1869-1886, October.
    15. Robert S. Harris & Tim Jenkinson & Steven N. Kaplan, 2014. "Private Equity Performance: What Do We Know?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 69(5), pages 1851-1882, October.
    16. Zwiebel, Jeffrey, 1995. "Corporate Conservatism and Relative Compensation," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 103(1), pages 1-25, February.
    17. Brown, Keith C & Harlow, W V & Starks, Laura T, 1996. "Of Tournaments and Temptations: An Analysis of Managerial Incentives in the Mutual Fund Industry," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 51(1), pages 85-110, March.
    18. Andrew Metrick, 2010. "The Economics of Private Equity Funds," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 23(6), pages 2303-2341, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Wang, Qing (Sophie) & Lai, Shaojie & Anderson, Hamish D., 2021. "VC fund preferences and exits of individual investors," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 67(C).
    2. Lahr, Henry & Trombley, Timothy E., 2020. "Early indicators of fundraising success by venture capital firms," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 65(C).
    3. Ben Amor, Salma & Kooli, Maher, 2024. "Does overconfidence affect venture capital firms’ investment?," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Elsevier, vol. 41(C).
    4. Jelic, Ranko & Zhou, Dan & Ahmad, Wasim, 2021. "Do stressed PE firms misbehave?," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 66(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Rin, Marco Da & Hellmann, Thomas & Puri, Manju, 2013. "A Survey of Venture Capital Research," Handbook of the Economics of Finance, in: G.M. Constantinides & M. Harris & R. M. Stulz (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Finance, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 573-648, Elsevier.
    2. Jia, Ning & Wang, Dan, 2017. "Skin in the game: General partner capital commitment, investment behavior and venture capital fund performance," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 47(C), pages 110-130.
    3. Hellmann, Thomas & Thiele, Veikko, 2022. "May the force be with you: Investor power and company valuations," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 72(C).
    4. Carolin Bock & Maximilian Schmidt, 2015. "Should I stay, or should I go? – How fund dynamics influence venture capital exit decisions," Review of Financial Economics, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 27(1), pages 68-82, November.
    5. Maurice McCourt, 2022. "Permanent private equity: Market performance and transactions," Journal of Financial Research, Southern Finance Association;Southwestern Finance Association, vol. 45(2), pages 339-383, June.
    6. Barber, Brad M. & Yasuda, Ayako, 2017. "Interim fund performance and fundraising in private equity," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 124(1), pages 172-194.
    7. Buchner, Axel & Wagner, Niklas F., 2017. "Rewarding risk-taking or skill? The case of private equity fund managers," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 80(C), pages 14-32.
    8. Brown, Gregory W. & Gredil, Oleg R. & Kaplan, Steven N., 2019. "Do private equity funds manipulate reported returns?," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 132(2), pages 267-297.
    9. Hochberg, Yael V. & Lindsey, Laura A. & Westerfield, Mark M., 2015. "Resource accumulation through economic ties: Evidence from venture capital," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 118(2), pages 245-267.
    10. Sensoy, Berk A. & Wang, Yingdi & Weisbach, Michael S., 2014. "Limited partner performance and the maturing of the private equity industry," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 112(3), pages 320-343.
    11. Tereza Tykvová, 2018. "Venture capital and private equity financing: an overview of recent literature and an agenda for future research," Journal of Business Economics, Springer, vol. 88(3), pages 325-362, May.
    12. Michael Ewens & Charles M. Jones & Matthew Rhodes-Kropf, 2013. "The Price of Diversifiable Risk in Venture Capital and Private Equity," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 26(8), pages 1854-1889.
    13. William Gornall & Ilya A. Strebulaev, 2017. "Squaring Venture Capital Valuations with Reality," NBER Working Papers 23895, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    14. Braun, Reiner & Jenkinson, Tim & Schemmerl, Christoph, 2020. "Adverse selection and the performance of private equity co-investments," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 136(1), pages 44-62.
    15. Bock, Carolin & Schmidt, Maximilian, 2015. "Should I stay, or should I go? – How fund dynamics influence venture capital exit decisions," Review of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 27(C), pages 68-82.
    16. Korteweg, Arthur & Sorensen, Morten, 2017. "Skill and luck in private equity performance," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 124(3), pages 535-562.
    17. Lahr, Henry & Trombley, Timothy E., 2020. "Early indicators of fundraising success by venture capital firms," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 65(C).
    18. Basak, Suleyman & Makarov, Dmitry, 2012. "Difference in interim performance and risk taking with short-sale constraints," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 103(2), pages 377-392.
    19. Josh Lerner & Ramana Nanda, 2020. "Venture Capital's Role in Financing Innovation: What We Know and How Much We Still Need to Learn," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 34(3), pages 237-261, Summer.
    20. Bienz, Carsten & Thorburn, Karin & Walz, Uwe, 2019. "Ownership, Wealth, and Risk Taking: Evidence on Private Equity Fund Managers," SAFE Working Paper Series 126, Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE, revised 2019.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Venture capital; Career concerns; Agency problems; Risk shifting;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G24 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Investment Banking; Venture Capital; Brokerage

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:corfin:v:49:y:2018:i:c:p:168-185. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.elsevier.com/locate/jcorpfin .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.