Graduation Year

2018

Date of Submission

12-2017

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Economics

Reader 1

Darren Filson

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2017 Zihan Ye

Abstract

Using data of first time fund in venture capital in United States from 1995 to 2015, I explore characteristics of the funds in relation to the fund performances. Three groups of characteristics that examined are fund characteristics, manager characteristics and limited partners’ characteristics. The paper also incorporates the time effects to show if market cycles have influences in these relationships. Some of the critical findings include that fund sizes have essentially zero impact on the fund return. In manager characteristics, it is very helpful to have a lead manager with MBA or equivalent degree. For limited partners, it is useful to have school endowments as limited partners which could influence the funds’ return positively. Both general partners and limited partners could learn from this paper and be more mindful of certain factor when investing in first time fund.

This thesis is restricted to the Claremont Colleges current faculty, students, and staff.

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