Investment Cycles and Startup Innovation

Ramana  Nanda; Matthew  Rhodes-Kropf

Article | Journal of Financial Economics | November 2013

Investment Cycles and Startup Innovation

by Ramana Nanda and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf

Abstract

We find that VC-backed firms receiving their initial investment in hot markets are more likely to go bankrupt, but conditional on going public are valued higher on the day of their IPO, have more patents, and have more citations to their patents. Our results suggest that VCs invest in riskier and more innovative startups in hot markets (rather than just worse firms). This is true even for the most experienced VCs. Furthermore, our results suggest that the flood of capital in hot markets also plays a causal role in shifting investments to more novel startups—by lowering the cost of experimentation for early stage investors and allowing them to make riskier, and more novel, investments.

Keywords: venture capital; innovation; Market Cycles; Financing Risk; Risk and Uncertainty; Venture Capital; Investment; Innovation and Invention;

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Citation:

Nanda, Ramana, and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf. "Investment Cycles and Startup Innovation." Journal of Financial Economics 110, no. 2 (November 2013): 403–418.

We use the construction of India's Golden Quadrangle (GQ) central highway network, together with comprehensive loan data drawn from the Reserve Bank of India, to investigate the interaction between infrastructure development and financial sector depth. We identify a disproportionate increase in loan count and average loan size in districts along the GQ highway network using stringent specifications with industry and district fixed effects. Our results hold in straight-line IV frameworks and are not present in “placebo tests” with another highway that was planned to be upgraded at the same time as GQ but subsequently delayed. Importantly, however, results are concentrated in districts with stronger initial financial development, suggesting that while financing does respond to large infrastructure investments and help spur real economic outcomes, initial financial sector development might play an important role in determining where real activity will grow.

Exploiting random assignment of judges to panels at Harvard Business School’s New Venture Competition (NVC) between 2000 and 2015, we find that exposure to more venture capitalist (VC) judges increases male participants’ chances of starting a VC-backed startup after HBS much more than this exposure increases female participants’ chances. A survey suggests this is in part because male participants more often proactively reach out to VC judges after the NVC. Our results suggest that networking frictions are an important reason men benefit more than women from exposure to VCs. Such frictions can help explain part of the gender gap in entrepreneurship and also have implications for how to design networking opportunities to facilitate financing of the best (rather than just the best networked) ideas.

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Investment Cycles and Startup Innovation

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