Attractiveness, ethnicity, and stage financing: exploring heuristics in venture capital staging
研究了企业家外貌吸引力与风险投资-企业家种族组合如何影响风险投资在早期融资中的分阶段强度，基于231家欧洲IT企业数据。
Understanding heuristics in stage financing is imperative, given the consequences of staging for both new venture entrepreneurs and VC investors. This study documents how entrepreneurs’ physical attractiveness affects VCs’ staging intensity during the early stages of the funding process, while taking into account the ethnic constellation of a given VC – entrepreneur dyad. Using a dataset for a representative sample of 231 European IT-ventures, the study finds that physical attractiveness of the lead entrepreneur and the ethnic constellation of a given VC-entrepreneur dyad independently and jointly affect a VC’s staging intensity during the early stages of the financing process. These findings were subjected to a two-stage least squares analysis and Heckman selection models.