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Field
Intervention (Hidden)
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Before
Attracting great startups is considered to be crucial to the success of a venture capital (VC) fund's performance. This paper investigates how different investor-level characteristics and fund-level organizational characteristics causally impact startup founders collaboration preferences to venture capitalists using the incentivized resume rating experimental method. Given the importance of different investor characteristics, we aim to answer the following three research questions.
a. Are U.S. startup founders biased against female and Asian venture capitalists?
b. Are impact VC funds aiming for ESG criteria more attractive to startup founders?
c.1 What other investor-level human capital characteristics (i.e., educational background, etc) and fund-level organizational capital characteristics causally impact VC's attractiveness to startup founders?
c.2 What are the relative importance of these characteristics?
Through eliciting startup founders' preferences for various venture capitalists, this project completes a field experimental system with Zhang 2021, which provide empirical insights for explaining several unique equilibrium phenomenon in the entrepreneurial finance literature. For example, why is the gender gap more persistent in the entrepreneurial community? Also, why is the VC fund performance also more persistent compared with other financial assets?
Detailed Experimental Design is provided in the attached "pre-registration plan.pdf".
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After
Attracting great startups is considered to be crucial to the success of a venture capital (VC) fund's performance. This paper investigates how different investor-level characteristics and fund-level organizational characteristics causally impact startup founders collaboration preferences to venture capitalists using the incentivized resume rating experimental method. Given the importance of different investor characteristics, we aim to answer the following three research questions.
a. Are U.S. startup founders biased against female and Asian venture capitalists?
b. Are impact VC funds aiming for ESG criteria more attractive to startup founders?
c.1 What other investor-level human capital characteristics (i.e., educational background, etc) and fund-level organizational capital characteristics causally impact VC's attractiveness to startup founders?
c.2 What are the relative importance of these characteristics?
Through eliciting startup founders' preferences for various venture capitalists, this project completes a field experimental system with Zhang 2021, which provide empirical insights for explaining several unique equilibrium phenomenon in the entrepreneurial finance literature. For example, why is the gender gap more persistent in the entrepreneurial community? Also, why is the VC fund performance also more persistent compared with other financial assets?
Detailed Experimental Design is provided in the attached "pre-registration plan.pdf".
When implicit discrimination is discovered, we also plan to replicate the study by recruiting founders from the Crunchbase platform. This recruitment approach offers the advantage of allowing researchers to collect comprehensive background information on experimental participants. Hence, it enables us to check whether subjects' implicit discrimination behaviors have stronger correlations with startups' real-world fundraising decisions. Moreover, we are curious about whether providing more information about investors makes it harder to detect discrimination in the IRR experimental method. This additional information on investors could potentially dilute participants' focus on investors' gender and race, thus influencing the accuracy of discrimination detection and reducing the experimental power.
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