Research

My interests are in venture capital, private equity, and entrepreneurial finance. I am specifically interested in research that aims to:

• Explain how investors construct their portfolios,

• Estimate their performance under different strategies and conditions, 

• Understand how venture capital investors contribute to innovation, business formation, and market efficiency, 

• Identify the underlying forces behind venture capital activity.

Working Papers:

Predicting Startup Outcomes With Machine Learning [Google Drive]

• Standard machine learning algorithms can significantly improve the selection of successful startups. This improvement does not come at the expense of missing out on highly successful startups and is robust to forward-looking and selection bias. I provide evidence that "AI-empowered" firms actively use these technologies, contributing to a predictability decline and rationalizing the existence of these potential gains.

The Role of Institutional Venture Capital Firms in Startup Success [Google Drive]

• Institutional Venture Capital (IVC) Firms specifically are responsible for most of the successful outcomes in venture capital, with a distinct (separable) and incremental (positive) effect toward success.

Presentations: Junior Academics Research Seminars (JARS), Online (2024)

Do VC financing round announcements convey new information about the state of the market? [SSRN]

• Investors can learn from certain financing round announcements that ventures tend to be underpriced and predictably benefit from investing after these announcements.

Presentations: University of Lausanne PhD Seminar (2023), University of Geneva PhD Seminar (2023)

Does venture capital concentration favor business formation? [SSRN]

• Large investors enjoy several benefits when investing, but increased scaling costs harm their returns, which are significantly lower than those of smaller investors.

Presentations: Global Finance Conference, Treviso (2023)

Why is corporate venture capital activity among U.S. public firms sticky? [SSRN]

• Corporate venture capital (CVC) activity in the U.S. is primarily motivated by the pursuit of investments perceived as attractive and explained by investment performance rather than the pursuit of innovation or synergies: (i) firms that invest in successful ventures keep investing, ceasing to invest otherwise, and (ii) patenting output only explain CVC activity for a tiny minority of firms.

Presentations: Irish Finance Academy, Limerick (2023), Portuguese Finance Network, Funchal (2023)