Essays on Entrepreneurship: Initial Public Offerings and Venture Capital Financing

This dissertation investigates initial public offerings (IPOs) and venture capital financing, two widely studied topics in the entrepreneurship domain. In each of the three chapters, I delve into each topic by exploring a relatively unique aspect of a phenomenon. In Chapter 1, I explore the case when investing in a distant industry, an agent in a network consisting of directional ties may suffer a decline in performance due to its lack of industry-specific knowledge. Empirically testing a population of venture capital (VC) firms spanning the entirety of Chinese VC history from 1991 to 2017, supplemented by qualitative interviews with VC partners, Chapter 1 finds that not every contact in such a network is able to advise the agent (the focal lead VC) equally well, because contacts connected by different tie types possess different industry-specific knowledge and tie directionality affects the likelihood of having contacts that possess needed knowledge. Specifically, the focal lead VC benefits more from contacts connected by outward ties than inward ties, while contacts connected by reciprocal ties provide the most informational benefits.