Founder Replacement and Startup Performance
研究发现风险投资家通过替换创始人能提升初创企业绩效，但简单回归显示负相关，工具变量回归则逆转符号，表明替换创始人是一种价值增值机制。
We provide causal evidence that venture capitalists (VCs) improve the performance of their portfolio companies by replacing founders. Using a database of venture capital financings augmented with hand-collected founder turnover events, we exploit shocks to the supply of outside executives via 14 states’ changes to non-compete laws from 1995 to 2016. Naive regressions of startup performance on replacement suggest a negative correlation that may reflect negative selection. Indeed, instrumented regressions reverse the sign of this effect, suggesting that founder replacement instead improves performance. The evidence points to the replacement of founders as a specific mechanism by which VCs add value.