Financing the Entrepreneurial Venture
用不完全契约模型分析创业企业融资，发现最优合同取决于企业家与投资者的努力互补性和资本机会成本，能解释高增长企业多用股权、生活方式企业多用债务等经验规律。
We model financial contracting in entrepreneurial ventures. In our incomplete contracts framework, the entrepreneur can design contracts contingent on three possible control right allocations: entrepreneur control, investor control, and joint control, with each allocation inducing different effort levels by both the entrepreneur and the investor. We find that a variety of contracts resembling financial instruments commonly used in practice, such as common stock, straight and convertible preferred equity, and secured and unsecured debt, can emerge as optimal, depending on two key factors: entrepreneur/investor effort complementarity and investors' opportunity cost of capital. The results of our model are consistent with, and yield new explanations for, empirical regularities such as (a) the prevalence of equity-type contracts in high-growth ventures and of debt-type contracts in lifestyle ventures; (b) geographical and temporal differences in equity-type instruments used in high-growth ventures; and (c) the impact of firm and loan characteristics on the choice between secured and unsecured debt.