David T. Robinson

Preprint · 2026 Private lending has exploded recently, owing not only to the retreat of banks from corporate lending, but also to the expansion of private equity (PE). Given the growing interest in retail access to alternative assets, we explore fees, performance, ... Full text Cite

Online Appendix for Populism, Polarization and Green Investment

Preprint · 2026 <div> This appendix provides complementary material to the main paper "Populism, Polarization and Green Investment" by Anders Anderson and David T. Robinson and is organized into eight sections: </div> <div> <span><br&g ... Full text Cite

Populism, Polarization and Green Investment

Preprint · 2024 We use detailed, individual-level, panel data to relate growing political polarization to (i) changing beliefs about the pace of global warming and (ii) the propensity to make climate-friendly investment decisions. Individuals in our study were exo ... Full text Cite

Are Some Angels Better than Others?

Preprint · 2024 We explore how the returns to angel investing relate to the financial, human, and social capital of the individual investors. Better-performing angels earn their higher returns through greater access to right-tail outcomes, not by avoiding losses. ... Full text Cite

Why Aren't There More Minority Entrepreneurs?

Preprint · 2024 We study racial and gender disparities in entrepreneurial activity through the lens of a Roy model, focusing on the distinction between idea generation and execution. Using nationally representative sur-vey data, we find that Black and Hispanic ind ... Full text Cite

Portfolio Management in Private Equity

Preprint · 2023 General Partners (GPs) in private equity face a trade-off between focusing their skills and effort on fewer investments to earn higher returns, or investing more broadly to reduce risk through diversification. Using a novel, deal-level dataset of 5 ... Full text Cite

Why Aren’t There More Minority Entrepreneurs?

Preprint · 2023 We examine racial and gender differences in the intention to start a business and steps taken along the path to starting a business. Black and Hispanic potential entrepreneurs are more likely to consider starting businesses; however, conditional on ... Full text Cite

Nothing but the Truth? Private Information and Reporting on Corporate Social Responsibility

Preprint · 2023 We develop and test a model in which firms can make non-verifiable statements about their CSR engagement, and hence may have incentives to mislead markets with exaggerated CSR claims. Firms may privately receive a signal correlated with their CSR e ... Full text Cite

Evaluating Selection Bias in Early-Stage Investment Returns

Preprint · 2023 This paper investigates sample selection bias in early-stage investment. We use comprehensive administrative data on the universe of new firm starts in Norway, allowing us to compare venture-backed firms with ex ante similar firms that do not recei ... Full text Cite

Portfolio Management in Private Equity

The Environmental Cost of Easy Credit: The Housing Channel

Preprint · 2023 Heating, cooling, and powering the residential housing stock accounts for about one-fifth of total annual greenhouse gas emissions in the US. Home size is a key determinant of energy intensity. The average newly built single-family home is 50% lar ... Full text Cite

The Environmental Cost of Easy Credit: The Housing Channel

Private Equity Portfolio Companies: A First Look at Burgiss Holdings Data

Preprint · 2020 This paper provides a first look at newly available data on the holdings of private equity (PE) funds. Because research has been hampered by the lack of comprehensive, high-quality data on portfolio companies, this new source offers the potential f ... Full text Cite

Black and White: Access to Capital among Minority-Owned Startups

Preprint · 2020 We use 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 st ... Full text Cite

A Theory of Liquidity in Private Equity

Preprint · 2020 We develop a model of private equity in which many empirical patterns arise endogenously. Our model rests solely on two critical features of this market: moral hazard for General partners (GPs) and illiquidity risk for Limited Partners (LPs). The e ... Full text Cite

Can Investors Time Their Exposure to Private Equity?

Preprint · 2018 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, t ... Full text Cite

What is the Business of Business?

Preprint · 2017 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 w ... Full text Cite

Who Feels the Nudge? Knowledge, Self-Awareness and Retirement Savings Decisions

Preprint · 2017 Using a financial literacy survey of Swedish pension investors matched to actual retirement savings decisions, we argue that respondents can be broken into three groups: those who are financially literate, those who mistakenly believe they are fina ... Full text Cite

Public Policy to Promote Entrepreneurship: A Call to Arms

Preprint · 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 inste ... Full text Cite

Competition and Innovation in Markets for Technology

Preprint · 2014 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 ma ... Full text Cite

Online Appendices to Capital Structure, Product Market Dynamics, and the Boundaries of the Firm

Preprint · 2014 This document contains the Online Appendices for the paper Capital Structure, Product Market Dynamics, and the Boundaries of the Firm. The paper to which these Appendices apply is available at the following URL: <a href="http://ssrn.com/abstrac ... Full text Cite

Firm Age, Investment Opportunities, and Job Creation

Preprint · 2014 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 non-tradable sector, we ... Full text Cite

Using Option Prices to Infer Overpayments and Synergies in M&A Transactions

Preprint · 2011 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 o ... Full text Cite

Optimism and Economic Crisis

Preprint · 2010 How are expectations for the future affected by economic crisis? This is a question of interest to both economists and psychologists, especially as we increasingly consider the interplay between the two disciplines. Using a longitudinal design, we ... Full text Cite

Cyclicality, Performance Measurement, and Cash Flow Liquidity in Private Equity

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

The Economic Psychology of Entrepreneurship and Family Business

Preprint · 2009 The paper studies how the attitudes of entrepreneurs, in general, and family business owners, in particular, differ from others in the economy. Family business owners are entrepreneurs who operate a business with their spouse or adult children. W ... Full text Cite

Patterns of Financing: A Comparison Between White- and African-American Young Firms - Fourth in a Series of Reports Using Data from the Kauffman Firm Survey

Preprint · 2009 This short report examines racial differences in access to financial capital. We focus on the role of capital injections - that is, injections of financial capital in the early, formative years after the business is started. Our results indicate th ... Full text Cite

The Capital Structure Decisions of New Firms

Preprint · 2009 This paper investigates the capital structure choices that firms make in their initial year of operation, using restricted-access data from the Kauffman Firm Survey. Contrary to many accounts of startup activity, the firms in our data rely heavily ... Full text Cite

Q Group Research Proposal: Private Equity Risk and Return: Recent Evidence

Preprint · 2009 Although of paramount importance to limited partners (LPs) in private equity funds, measuring the risk and return of private equity investments has proven a daunting challenge for empirical research. A key constraint has been lack of data: informat ... Full text Cite

The Role of Human Capital in the Screening of New Ventures

Preprint · 2008 The venture capital and entrepreneurial finance literature has definitively shown that venture capital (VC) investors are associated with better startup performance. In general, VC-backed startups are more likely than their non-VC backed peers to s ... Full text Cite

Optimism without Illusion: The Impact of Experience on Expectations

Preprint · 2008 Whether judgment and decision making biases improve with experience remains an important and contentious question. Positive illusions, for example, have been documented extensively, but virtually always in single-shot settings. To what extent do th ... Full text Cite

Market Structure, Internal Capital Markets, and the Boundaries of the Firm

Preprint · 2006 We study how a firm's optimal integration decision depends on the interaction between the product markets and capital markets in which it operates. An integrated firm operates an internal capital market, which provides allocative flexibility but do ... Full text Cite

What's in a Name? Causes and Consequences of Corporate Name Changes

Preprint · 2005 This paper relates different types of corporate name changes to the reputational concerns that precede them, and to the corporate events and subsequent performance that follow them. Firms change their name to affect perceptions among investors. The ... Full text Cite

Optimism and Economic Choice

Preprint · 2005 This paper presents some of the first large-scale survey evidence linking optimism to major economic choices. We create a novel measure of optimism using the Survey of Consumer Finance by comparing a person's self-reported life expectancy to that i ... Full text Cite

The Market for Mergers and the Boundaries of the Firm

Preprint · 2004 Mergers are the mechanisms that redraw the boundaries of the firm. In this paper, we relate incomplete contracts, upon which much of our understanding of firm boundaries is based, to empirical regularities in the market for mergers and acquisitions ... Full text Cite

Valuation Waves and Merger Activity: The Empirical Evidence

Preprint · 2004 To test recent theories that suggest valuation errors affect merger activity, we develop a decomposition that breaks M/B into three components: the firm-specific pricing deviation from short-run industry pricing; sector-wide, short-run deviations f ... Full text Cite

Financial Contracting in Biotech Strategic Alliances

Preprint · 2002 We conduct a detailed analysis of 125 strategic alliance contracts, all of which concern early-stage, genomics-based research at small, biotechnology R&D companies. Staged investment is ubiquitous, but solutions to agency problems vary. The cyc ... Full text Cite

Strategic Alliances and the Boundaries of the Firm

Preprint · 2001 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 p ... Full text Cite

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

Preprint · 2000 This paper analyzes the amount of information that can be extracted from stock prices around takeover contests. The first part of the paper shows that it is not generally possible to use target and bidder stock price movements to infer the market's ... Full text Cite

Network Effects in the Governance of Strategic Alliances in Biotechnology

Preprint · 2000 Strategic alliances are commonplace in the biotechnology sector. We posit that the stock of prior alliances between participants in the biotech industry produces a network---a communications infrastructure established by past transactions---through ... Full text Cite