We study the conflict of interests between the limited partners (LPs) and the general partner (GP) in a venture capital (VC) fund with a limited life span. LPs commit money, while the GP selects and monitors projects. Midway into the project, the GP privately observes the project’s quality and the estimated time to exit. The fund’s limited time horizon and the GP’s informational advantage lead to inefficient decisions at this stage. First, the GP continues bad projects. Second, he may stop monitoring good, but delay-prone projects. We provide empirical predictions and illustrative evidence that the magnitude of the effect is significant.

We hypothesize that age similarity among small shareholders acts as an implicit coordinating device for their actions and, thus, could represent an indirect source of corporate governance in firms with dispersed ownership. We test this hypothesis on a sample of Swedish firms during the 1995–2000 period. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that compared with shareholders of differing ages, same-age noncontrolling shareholders sell more aggressively following negative firm news; firms with more age-similar small shareholders are more profitable and command higher valuation; and an increase (decline) in a firm's small shareholder age similarity brings a significantly large increase (decline) in its stock price. The last effects are more pronounced in the absence of a controlling shareholder.