Scholars@Duke
David T. Robinson

David T. Robinson

James and Gail Vander Weide Distinguished Professor
Fuqua School of Business
Box 90120, 100 Fuqua Drive, Durham, NC 27708-0120
W403 Academic Center, Fuqua School of Business, Durham, NC 27708

Selected Publications

A Theory of Liquidity in Private Equity

Journal Article Management Science · October 1, 2023 We develop a model of private equity capturing two fundamental features of this market: the fund structure and illiquidity. A fund structure with sequential capital calls arises as an optimal solution to fund managers' (GPs) moral hazard problem but expose ... Full text Cite

Competition and Innovation in Markets for Technology

Journal Article Management Science · August 1, 2023 We examine the impact of product market competition on innovation in markets for technology. An innovator makes an investment in quality-improving innovation that can be licensed to one (targeted licensing) or all (market-wide licensing) product market com ... Full text Cite

Financial Literacy in the Age of Green Investment

Journal Article Review of Finance · November 1, 2022 We survey a large sample of Swedish households and connect the responses to administrative data to relate pro-environmental attitudes and values to actual investment decisions. Pro-environment households are not more likely to hold pro-environment portfoli ... Full text Cite

Black and White: Access to Capital Among Minority-Owned Start-ups

Journal Article Management Science · April 1, 2022 We used confidential and restricted-access data from the Kauffman Firm Survey and matched administrative data on credit scores to explore racial disparities in access to capital for new business ventures. The novel results on racial inequality in start-up ... Full text Cite

Should Defined Contribution Plans Include Private Equity Investments?

Journal Article Financial Analysts Journal · January 1, 2022 This paper evaluates the pros and cons of including private equity fund investments in defined contribution plans. Potential benefits include higher returns and improved diversification as well as a relatively safe method for accessing investments previous ... Full text Cite

Can investors time their exposure to private equity?

Journal Article Journal of Financial Economics · February 1, 2021 Private equity performance, both for buyouts and venture capital, has been highly cyclical: periods of high fundraising have been followed by periods of low performance. Despite this seemingly predictable variation, we find modest gains, at best, to pursui ... Full text Cite

Paying for performance in private equity: Evidence from venture capital partnerships

Journal Article Management Science · January 1, 2020 We offer the first empirical analysis connecting the timing of general partner (GP) compensation to private equity fund performance. Using detailed information on limited partnership agreements between private equity limited and general partners, we find t ... Full text Cite

When is social responsibility socially desirable?

Journal Article Journal of Labor Economics · October 1, 2018 We study a model in which corporate social responsibility arises in response to inefficient regulation. In our model, firms, governments, and workers interact. Firms create negative spillovers that can be attenuated through government regulation, which is ... Full text Cite

Testing for racial bias in business credit scores

Journal Article Small Business Economics · March 1, 2018 We develop a novel empirical test of racial bias based on comparisons between forward-looking, expectations-based credit scores and backward-looking, repayment-history-based credit scores. We then test for racial bias using confidential-access data from th ... Full text Cite

New directions in entrepreneurship research with the Kauffman Firm Survey

Journal Article Small Business Economics · March 1, 2018 Data is a fundamental impediment to a better understanding of the multifaceted process of new firm creation. With better data, we can form a better understanding of the causes, constraints, and outcomes associated with the decision to launch a new business ... Full text Cite

What is the business of business?

Journal Article Innovation Policy and the Economy · January 1, 2018 This paper develops a simple framework for understanding the emergence of new organizational forms, such as socially responsible firms and social entrepreneurs, that embody the private sector’s efforts to resolve problems that typically have been within th ... Full text Cite

When Is Social Responsibility Socially Desirable?

Journal Article Journal of Labor Economics · January 1, 2018 We study a model in which corporate social responsibility (CSR) arises as a response to inefficient regulation. In our model, firms, governments, and workers interact. Firms generate profits but create negative spillovers that can be attenuated through gov ... Full text Cite

Precautionary savings, retirement planning and misperceptions of financial literacy

Journal Article Journal of Financial Economics · November 1, 2017 We measure financial literacy among LinkedIn members, complementing standard questions with additional questions that allow us to gauge self-perceptions of financial literacy. Average financial literacy is surprisingly low given the demographics of our sam ... Full text Cite

Firm Age, Investment Opportunities, and Job Creation

Scholarly Edition · June 1, 2017 New firms are an important source of job creation, but the underlying economic mechanisms for why this is so are not well understood. Using an identification strategy that links shocks to local income to job creation in the nontradable sector, we ask wheth ... Full text Cite

Cyclicality, performance measurement, and cash flow liquidity in private equity

Scholarly Edition · December 1, 2016 We study the liquidity properties of private equity cash flows using data from 837 buyout and venture capital funds from 1984 to 2010. Most cash flow variation at a point in time is diversifiable — either idiosyncratic to a given fund or explained by the f ... Full text Cite

Public policy to promote entrepreneurship: a call to arms

Journal Article Small Business Economics · June 1, 2016 We debate the motivation for and effectiveness of public policies to encourage individuals to become entrepreneurs. Reviewing established evidence we find that most Western world policies do not greatly reduce or solve any market failures but instead waste ... Full text Cite

Capital structure, product market dynamics, and the boundaries of the firm

Journal Article Management Science · December 1, 2014 We model a new product market opportunity as an option and ask whether it is best exploited by a large incumbent firm (integration) or by a small separate firm (nonintegration). Starting from a standard framework, in which value-maximizing investment and f ... Full text Cite

The capital structure decisions of new firms

Journal Article Review of Financial Studies · January 1, 2014 We study capital structure choices that entrepreneurs make in their firms' initial year of operation, using restricted-access data from the Kauffman Firm Survey. Firms in our data rely heavily on external debt sources, such as bank financing, and less exte ... Full text Cite

Do private equity fund managers earn their fees? Compensation, ownership, and cash flow performance

Scholarly Edition · November 1, 2013 We study the relations between management contract terms and performance in private equity using new data for 837 funds from 1984-2010. We find no evidence that higher fees or lower managerial ownership are associated with lower net-of-fee performance. Nev ... Full text Cite

The economic psychology of entrepreneurship and family business

Journal Article Journal of Economics and Management Strategy · June 1, 2013 This paper studies the attitudes of entrepreneurs, both how they differ as a group from others in the economy, as well as how they differ from one another according to the mode of entry into entrepreneurship and whether or not the firm is a family business ... Full text Cite

Strategic alliances, venture capital, and exit decisions in early stage high-tech firms

Journal Article Journal of Financial Economics · March 1, 2013 We study the trade-offs that biotech start-ups face in the private equity market when they choose between raising firm-level capital from venture capitalists or project-level capital from strategic alliance partners. Increased alliance activity makes futur ... Full text Cite

Using option prices to infer overpayments and synergies in m&a transactions

Journal Article Review of Financial Studies · March 1, 2013 In this paper, we use call option prices to identify synergies and news from merger and acquisition (M&A) transaction announcements. We find that M&A announcements result in large and approximately equal gains to the bidder and the target on average, with ... Full text Cite

What does financial literacy training teach us?

Journal Article Journal of Economic Education · July 1, 2012 The authors use data from a finance-related theme park to explore how financial education changes investment, financing, and consumer behavior. Students were assigned fictitious life situations and asked to create household budgets. Some students received ... Full text Cite

Size, ownership and the market for corporate control

Journal Article Journal of Corporate Finance · February 1, 2009 This paper is written with two goals in mind. The first is to offer a critical discussion of papers by Bauguess, Moeller, Schlingemann, and Zutter [Bauguess, Scott, Moeller, Sara, Schlingemann, Frederich and Zutter, Chad, 2009. Ownership structure and targ ... Full text Cite

Fear and loathing in Las Vegas: Evidence from blackjack tables

Journal Article Judgment and Decision Making · January 1, 2009 This paper uses proprietary data from a blackjack table in Las Vegas to analyze how the expectation of regret affects peoples' decisions during gambles. Even among a group of people who choose to participate in a risk-taking activity, we find strong eviden ... Full text Cite

Market structure, internal capital markets, and the boundaries of the firm

Journal Article Journal of Finance · December 1, 2008 We study how the creation of an internal capital market (ICM) can invite strategic responses in product markets that, in turn, shape firm boundaries. ICMs provide ex post resource flexibility, but come with ex ante commitment costs. Alternatively, stand-al ... Full text Cite

Strategic alliances and the boundaries of the firm

Journal Article Review of Financial Studies · April 1, 2008 Strategic alliances are long-term contracts between legally distinct organizations that provide for sharing the costs and benefits of a mutually beneficial activity. In this paper, I develop and test a model that helps explain why firms sometimes prefer al ... Full text Cite

The Market for Mergers and the Boundaries of the Firm

Journal Article Journal of Finance · January 1, 2008 We relate the property rights theory of the firm to empirical regularities in the market for mergers and acquisitions. We first show that high market-to-book acquirers typically do not purchase low market-to-book targets. Instead, mergers pair together fir ... Full text Cite

Optimism and economic choice

Journal Article Journal of Financial Economics · October 1, 2007 We create a novel measure of optimism using the Survey of Consumer Finance by comparing self-reported life expectancy to that implied by statistical tables. This measure of optimism correlates with positive beliefs about future economic conditions and with ... Full text Cite

Efficient mechanisms for mergers and acquisitions

Journal Article International Economic Review · August 1, 2007 We characterize incentive-efficient merger outcomes when payments can be made both in cash and stock. Each firm has private information about both its stand-alone value and a component of the (possibly negative) potential synergies. We study two cases: whe ... Full text Cite

Financial contracting in biotech strategie alliances

Journal Article Journal of Law and Economics · August 1, 2007 We analyze 125 strategic alliance contracts, all of which concern early-stage research at small biotechnology research and development companies. Staged investment is ubiquitous, but solutions to agency problems vary. The cycle of equity participation in a ... Full text Cite

Network effects in the governance of strategic alliances

Journal Article Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization · April 1, 2007 We argue that the stock of prior alliances between participants in the biotechnology sector forms a network that serves as a governance mechanism in interfirm transactions. To test how this network substitutes for other governance mechanisms, we examine ho ... Full text Cite

Industry concentration and average stock returns

Journal Article Journal of Finance · August 1, 2006 Firms in more concentrated industries earn lower returns, even after controlling for size, book-to-market, momentum, and other return determinants. Explanations based on chance, measurement error, capital structure, and persistent in-sample cash flow shock ... Full text Cite

Valuation waves and merger activity: The empirical evidence

Journal Article Journal of Financial Economics · September 1, 2005 To test recent theories suggesting that valuation errors affect merger activity, we develop a decomposition that breaks the market-to-book ratio (M/B) into three components: the firm-specific pricing deviation from short-run industry pricing; sector-wide, ... Full text Cite

What is the Price of Hubris? Using Takeover Battles to Infer Overpayments and Synergies

Journal Article Financial Management · January 1, 2003 We present a framework for determining the information that can be extracted from stock prices around takeover contests. In only two types of cases is it theoretically possible to use stock price movements to infer bidder overpayment and relative synergies ... Full text Cite

Adjustment of iron intake for dietary enhancers and inhibitors in population studies: bioavailable iron in rural and urban residing Russian women and children.

Journal Article J Nutr · August 1997 Although determining iron intakes is essential in assessing adequacy of iron in the diet, estimating iron availability may be more useful for evaluating whether iron requirements are met. Our objectives were to describe the dietary information, analytical ... Full text Link to item Cite

RII: Stata module to perform Repeated-Imputation Inference

Software rii is a prefix command that runs multiple imputations of a model based on the value of the multiple imputation variable. rii has been tested on probit, tobit, cnreg, and regress. rii uses the repeated-imputation inference (RII) technique to derive O ... Cite