"I present a model of financing social enterprises to delineate the role of impact investors relative to "pure" philanthropists. I characterize the optimal scale and structure of a social enterprise when financed by grants and when financed by investments. The analysis yields two heuristics to guide impact investors. First, investments allow a financier to discipline inefficient spending. Second, investments may enable a social enterprise to exploit new opportunities for profit and may increase the enterprise's scale relative to when grant financed. I quantify these heuristics for the case of Husk Power, a social enterprise that has received impact investment."

"Do networks plentiful in ideas provide early stage startups with performance advantages? On the one hand, network positions that provide access to a multitude of ideas are thought to increase team performance. On the other hand, research on network formation argues that such positional advantages should be fleeting as entrepreneurs strategically compete over the most valuable network positions.

Beyond providing causal evidence for the durability of network based performance advantages, these findings provide micro-level support to the importance of knowledge spillovers within bootcamps, accelerators, and startup ecosystems more generally."

"This paper documents that ventures that are funded by two successful angel groups experience superior outcomes to rejected ventures: they have improved survival, exits, employment, patenting, web traffic, and financing. We use strong discontinuities in angel funding behavior over small changes in their collective interest levels to implement a regression discontinuity approach. We confirm the positive effects for venture operations, with qualitative support for a higher likelihood of successful exits. On the other hand, there is no difference in access to additional financing around the discontinuity. This might suggest that financing is not a central input of angel groups."