Learning by Investing: Entrepreneurial Spillovers from Venture Capital

We thank the Center for Enterprise Research at Peking University for giving us access to the data used in the paper and Harvard Business School’s Division of Research and MIT Sloan for funding. We are indebted to Manju Puri (Editor), the Associate Editor, and two anonymous referees. We thank Jun Chen (discussant), Emanuele Colonnelli (discussant), Sabrina Howell, Roxana Mihet (discussant), Vikram Nanda (discussant), Antoinette Schoar, Paula Suh (discussant), and Melanie Wallskog (discussant), as well as seminar and conference participants at the Central University of Finance and Economics, Econ@Sloan Workshop, Maastricht University, Peking University, University of Houston, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Tilburg University, Virtual Household Finance Seminar, Norwegian School of Economics, 2023 Columbia Private Equity Conference, 2023 IPC Spring Research Symposium, 7th Young Scholars Finance Consortium, 2023Western Finance Association meetings, 2024 RCFS Winter Conference, 2024 PERC Oxford Research Symposium, 7th Annual Private Markets Research Conference, 2024 China Financial Research Conference, and 2024 NBER Chinese Economy Meeting for helpful comments. We thank Zijun Cheng, Songrui Liu, Yiqing Mo, Xu Xiang, Yijing Zheng, Yuxuan Zheng, and especially Ruilin Cheng for excellent research assistance. Lerner has received compensation for advising institutional investors in venture capital funds, venture capital groups, and/or governments designing policies relevant to venture capital. The opinions expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not reflect the view of the CIFCM. All errors and omissions are our own. Supplementary material can be found on The Review of Financial Studies website. Send correspondence to Jinlin Li, lijinlin@csrc.gov.cn. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• November 21, 2023
• December 2, 2025