Based on a sample of venture capital (VC)-backed IPO firms, we examine whether tolerance for failure spurs corporate innovation. We develop a novel measure of VC investors' failure tolerance by examining their willingness to continue investing in underperforming ventures. We find that IPO firms backed by more failure-tolerant VC investors are significantly more innovative and VC failure tolerance is particularly important for ventures that are subject to high failure risk. We show that these results are not driven by endogenous matching between failure-tolerant VC firms and start-ups with high ex ante innovative potential. We also examine the determinants of the cross-sectional heterogeneity in a VC firm's failure tolerance. We find that both capital constraints and career concerns can negatively distort a VC firm's failure tolerance. Less experienced VC firms are more exposed to these distortions, making them less failure tolerant than are more established VC firms. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.

We examine the role of cultural heritage in shaping U.S. CEOs’ attitudes toward uncertainty, in the context of their corporate acquisition decisions. We find that CEOs with a more uncertainty-avoiding cultural heritage are less likely to engage in acquisitions. Conditional on making an acquisition, uncertainty-averse CEOs prefer targets in familiar industries and targets that can be more easily integrated. The emphasis on cultural identity by CEOs’ parents and the ethnic composition of CEOs’ early life environment significantly influence the cultural transmission process. Cultural differences about uncertainty attitudes persist over multiple generations, but become less pronounced over time.

We evaluate whether management risk, which arises from investors’ uncertainty about management’s added value, affects firms’ default risks and debt pricing. We find that, regardless of the reason for the turnover, CDS, loan, and bond yield spreads increase at the time of management turnover, when management risk is highest, and decline over the first three years of the new CEO’s tenure. The effects increase with prior investor uncertainty about the new management. These results are consistent with the view that management risk affects firms’ default risk. An understanding of management risk yields a number of implications for corporate finance. Received May 15, 2016; editorial decision February 27, 2017 by Editor David Denis.

This paper documents the existence of a CEO investment cycle, in which disinvestment decreases over a CEO's tenure, while investment increases, leading to “cyclical” firm growth in assets and employment. The estimated variation in investment rate over the CEO investment cycle is of the same order of magnitude as the differences caused by business cycles or financial constraints. Results from a number of tests generally support the view that the investment cycle is caused by agency problems, leading to increasing investment quantity and decreasing investment quality over time as the CEO gains more control over his board.

Consistent with predictions from a stylized Bayesian learning model stock return volatility declines with CEO tenure in a convex manner, even for CEOs whose appointments occur for exogenous reasons. The decline is faster when there is higher uncertainty about the CEO's ability when there is more transparency about the firm's prospects, and when CEO ability is more important in value creation. We quantify the importance of uncertainty about CEO ability relative to the firm's fundamental cash flow uncertainty in contributing to stock return volatility, highlighting the importance of management in creating value.