Data on selling by venture capitalists during the IPOs of their portfolio companies are used to examine the relation between insider selling decisions and reputation. We hypothesize that, in deciding whether to sell, venture capitalists balance the costs of continued managerial/monitoring involvement against the adverse reaction to selling. Further, they facilitate unwinding of investment positions by developing reputations for not selling overpriced shares. Evidence on the timing of IPOs and selling decisions of venture capitalists confirms the importance of reputation as a determinant of the organization of the venture capital market and as a factor affecting insider selling decisions.

An econometric methodology is proposed for reconciling inaccurate measures of latent data which are subject to accounting constraints. The method deals with the case in which the measurement errors are serially correlated, generalizing previous contributions. A class of efficient estimators are derived for the latent data. Consistent estimators for the weight matrices applied to the observed information based on a linear regression procedure are obtained together with confidence interval estimators for these weight matrices. Approximate confidence intervals are suggested for the latent data themselves together with specification tests for the assumptions underlying the procedure. An application of the proposed method is made to U.K. Gross Domestic Product in constant prices for 1958Q1–1989Q4.