Francesco Di Lorenzo

The role of corporate venture capital investment in patent sales

Patents are important strategic assets for high-tech ventures. However, many ventures sell patents instead of investing time and resources for commercializing them. We explore the organizational un...

'Another Roof, Another Proof': How Mobility Explains Individual Productivity in Science

The mobility of highly skilled employees is seen as a critical way for organizations to transfer knowledge and to improve organizational performance. Yet, the relationship between mobility and individual performance is still largely a theoretical and empirical puzzle. Building both on human capital mobility research and economics of science literature, and exploiting a unique dataset of 348 academics working in biology department in the United Kingdom, we show that mobility has a positive effect on individual productivity. We also find that this positive effect is reinforced when academics move towards better-endowed institutions. We complement our econometrical analysis with more qualitative evidence from a survey.

Venture Capital Investment Strategies Under Financing Constraints: Evidence from the 2008 Financial Crisis

This paper employs the 2008 financial crisis as an empirical setting to examine how investment strategies of venture capitalists (VCs) vary in the presence of a liquidity supply shock, and what the performance implications of these strategies are for their portfolio startups. We show that while, on aggregate, funded startups receive no less financing during the financial crisis than in non-crisis times, VCs allocate relatively more resources to startups operating in the VCs’ core sectors. We show that this skew allocation follows from VCs choosing to double down on their core-sector investing, rather than by a changed mix of investors or startups during the financial crisis. These effects are strongest for early-stage startups, for which information problems are most severe. Furthermore, these results are driven by the investment strategies of more-experienced VCs. Building on these findings, we find superior ex post performance among crisis-funded portfolio startups operating in more-experienced VCs’ core sectors.