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• Article | Journal of Economic Perspectives | Summer 2020

  Venture Capital's Role in Financing Innovation: What We Know and How Much We Still Need to Learn

  Josh Lerner and Ramana Nanda

  Venture capital is associated with some of the most high-growth and influential firms in the world. Academics and practitioners have effectively articulated the strengths of the venture model. At the same time, venture capital financing also has real limitations in its ability to advance substantial technological change. Three issues are particularly concerning to us: 1) the very narrow band of technological innovations that fit the requirements of institutional venture capital investors; 2) the relatively small number of venture capital investors who hold, and shape the direction of, a substantial fraction of capital that is deployed into financing radical technological change; and 3) the relaxation in recent years of the intense emphasis on corporate governance by venture capital firms. While our ability to assess the social welfare impact of venture capital remains nascent, we hope that this article will stimulate discussion of and research into these questions.

  Keywords: innovation; financing; Venture Capital; Financing and Loans; Technological Innovation;

  Citation:

  Lerner, Josh, and Ramana Nanda. "Venture Capital's Role in Financing Innovation: What We Know and How Much We Still Need to Learn." Journal of Economic Perspectives 34, no. 3 (Summer 2020): 237–261.  View Details

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• Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020

  The Project on Impact Investments' Impact Investment Database

  M. Diane Burton, Shawn Cole, Abhishek Dev, Christina Jarymowycz, Leslie Jeng, Josh Lerner, Fanele Mashwama, Yue (Cynthia) Xu and T. Robert Zochowski

  Impact investing has grown significantly over the past 15 years. From a niche investing segment with only $25 billion AUM in 2013 (WEF 2013), it experienced double-digit growth and developed into a market with an estimated $502 billion AUM (Mudaliapar and Dithrich 2019). Despite the growth and maturation of impact investing, gathering complete and accurate data on the characteristics of this industry continues to be a challenge. This paper describes the creation of a new dataset on both impact investors and the portfolio companies they fund, comprising 409 impact investors and 13,212 portfolio companies. We code impact investors according to established categories such as legal form, types of investments and return objectives. We then develop measures of the relative importance of social impact for each investor in an effort to add a new analytic categorization. We conclude by describing the distribution of investors and firms across these various categories.

  Keywords: impact investing; Investment; Data and Data Sets; Analysis;

  Citation:

  Burton, M. Diane, Shawn Cole, Abhishek Dev, Christina Jarymowycz, Leslie Jeng, Josh Lerner, Fanele Mashwama, Yue (Cynthia) Xu, and T. Robert Zochowski. "The Project on Impact Investments' Impact Investment Database." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-117, May 2020.  View Details

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• Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020

  Financial Distancing: How Venture Capital Follows the Economy Down and Curtails Innovation

  Sabrina T. Howell, Josh Lerner, Ramana Nanda and Richard Townsend

  Although late-stage venture capital (VC) activity did not change dramatically in the first two months after the COVID-19 pandemic reached the U.S., early-stage VC activity declined by 38%. The particular sensitivity of early-stage VC investment to market conditions—which we show to be common across recessions spanning four decades from 1976 to 2017—raises questions about the pro-cyclicality of VC and its implications for innovation, especially in light of the common narrative that VC is relatively insulated from public markets. We find that the implications for innovation are not benign: innovation conducted by VC-backed firms in recessions is less highly cited, less original, less general, and less closely related to fundamental science. These effects are more pronounced for startups financed by early-stage venture funds. Given the important role that VC plays in financing breakthrough innovations in the economy, our findings have implications for the broader discussion on the nature of innovation across business cycles.

  Keywords: innovation; recessions; Venture Capital; Innovation and Invention; Patents; Business Cycles; Economic Slowdown and Stagnation;

  Citation:

  Howell, Sabrina T., Josh Lerner, Ramana Nanda, and Richard Townsend. "Financial Distancing: How Venture Capital Follows the Economy Down and Curtails Innovation." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-115, May 2020.  View Details

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