Private equity for rapidly growing small business is raised primarily from the organized venture capital market and the informal market, comprised of high-net worth individuals or “angel” investors. We discuss commercially and publicly available data on private equity, the research findings of studies that use these data, and some of the more important questions that the available data have been unable to address.

This paper presents a model of incentive compatible bank regulation under moral hazard and adverse selection. We derive a wide range of simple and conceptually implementable mechanisms that can solve each type of incentive problem separately and also achieve the first-best outcome – but only when regulatory instruments involve ex post pricing that is contingent on the bank's performance relative to the market. An important feature of these mechanisms is that they do not involve a subsidy to the bank. When the regulator faces both moral hazard and adverse selection simultaneously, we identify the conditions under which the same mechanism can achieve the first-best solution.

This paper provides a consistent and asymptotically normal estimator for the intercept of a semiparametrically estimated sample selection model. The estimator uses a decreasingly small fraction of all observations as the sample size goes to infinity, as in Heckman (1990). In the semiparametrics literature, estimation of the intercept has typically been subsumed in the nonparametric sample selection bias correction term. The estimation of the intercept, however, is important from an economic perspective. For instance, it permits one to determine the “wage gap” between unionized and nonunionized workers, decompose the wage differential between different socioeconomic groups (e.g. male-female and black-white), and evaluate the net benefits of a social programme.

Glenn W. Boyle, Richard B. Carter, Roger D. Stover, Extraordinary Antitakeover Provisions and Insider Ownership Structure: The Case of Converting Savings and Loans, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Jun., 1998), pp. 291-304

This paper re-examines the effect of asset ownership on investment decisions for a joint relationship in the absence of contracts on investment levels. It obtains some results which contradict findings by Sanford J. Grossman, Oliver D. Hart, and John Moore. In particular, it finds that the loss of ownership of an asset may increase the asset loser's investment incentive. The difference between this paper and those authors' papers stems from the different interpretations of the roles of the threat point and outside options in bargaining. This paper also clarifies the role of relationship-specific investments as a cause of integration. Copyright 1998 by American Economic Association.