This study analyzes Form D filings to understand brokered startup offerings. About 60% of brokers are FINRA-registered; the rest, “finders,” are not. Startups with fewer seasoned investors and more local brokers tend to use brokers. Venture capital firms rarely join brokered offerings, but non-accredited investors do, especially offerings with finders. Overall, brokers aid in raising capital. Yet, startups using finders often fail to exit successfully and close following funding. This implies finders might be directing funds from non-accredited investors to lower-quality startups. Brokers help startups raise money without VC support, but the effectiveness of this capital allocation is unclear.

ABSTRACT We classify the race of over 160,000 U.S. founders and investors and study the venture capital (VC) funding gap for Black entrepreneurs. Only 3.1% of VC‐funded startups are Black‐owned, and they raise half as much VC funding as others. We attribute much of this gap to Black founders having fewer traditional success markers, like patents or entrepreneurial experience. This disparity also affects matching: Black VC partners invest more in Black founders, and these investments have higher successful exit rates. We attribute this outperformance to lower information asymmetries due to network overlap and “screening discrimination,” whereby Black VCs better differentiate among Black founders.

We test whether bank loans change public bond yields. A 25% increase in bank debt raises bond yields by 8 bps, reflecting a trade-off between the benefits of bank cross-monitoring and higher bond risk. This effect is smaller for firms with no credit default swaps (CDSs) and with junk debt—scenarios where bank monitoring is most valuable. It is unlikely that firms with bank debt are riskier, because they are less likely to be downgraded and have lower loan spreads. We find similar results using a natural experiment around the 2014 oil shock. Our results highlight how bond yields depend on incentive conflicts among creditors.

We study the relationship between buyout and venture capital (VC) funds’ returns, and more typically available proxies—exits via M&A or IPO. We further explore the effects of filters on the selection of M&As and IPOs (to emphasize successes), on the relationship. We show that some of these filters can reduce the count of exits by as much as 80% without significantly improving the correlation between exits and fund returns. We also show that for venture capital funds, counting acquisitions that are at least twice the amount of funding raised results in the best correlation between exits via an acquisition and fund returns. Finally, when the sample comprises young startups – that are perhaps not yet ready for any form of exit – follow-on funding, employment, website ranking, and patent activity can be used as proxies for exits in place of IPOs or acquisitions.

When race is not directly observed, regulators and analysts commonly predict it using algorithms based on last name and address. In small business lending—where regulators assess fair lending law compliance using the Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG) algorithm—we document large prediction errors among Black Americans. The errors bias measured racial disparities in loan approval rates downward by 43%, with greater bias for traditional vs. fintech lenders. Regulation using self-identified race would increase lending to Black borrowers, but also shift lending toward affluent areas because errors correlate with socioeconomics. Overall, using race proxies in policymaking and research presents challenges.

We examine the costs of trading restrictions by exploiting an SEC rule change eliminating an approximately 80-day restriction period in private placements for small issuers. Using a difference-in-differences specification, we find that the restriction is binding, as dollar volume increases 19 percentage points vis-à-vis proceeds, and costly, as offering discounts fall by 8 percentage points. Discounts fall more for issuers with higher information asymmetry or longer restriction periods. We account for endogenous responses to the rule change. Overall, our findings suggest that trading restrictions are costly and have large effects on firms’ cost of capital.

One-third of deals in the venture capital (VC) market involve a founder and investor from the same university. Venture capitalists are more likely to invest in and place larger bets on startups with founders from their alma mater. These deals are also more likely to lead to IPOs postfunding. Tests using VC partner turnover confirm a direct link between education ties and funding likelihood. Taken together, our results suggest that university connections facilitate improved deal-making and outcomes, rather than diverting funds toward lower-quality startups.