Empirical Analysis

The initial research for this Article was conducted while I was an Olin Fellow in Law and Economics at Columbia Law School. I would like to thank Bernie Black, John Donohue, Merritt Fox, Ron Gilson, Victor Goldberg, Jeff Gordon, Zohar Goshen, Michael Guttentag, Todd Henderson, Michael Jensen, Steven Kaplan, Michael Klausner, Ed Rock, Jeff Strnad, Susan Woodward, the editors of The University of Chicago Law Review, and participants in The Going-private Phenomenon: Causes and Implications, the annual meeting of the American Law and Economics Association, and the Columbia Law School Blue Sky Lunch for comments. I especially thank the venture capitalists, venture capital lawyers, and representatives of institutional investors who were willing to answer my questions and in some cases provide the limited partnership agreements that are the focus of this Article. Those who have given me permission to name them include: Steven Anderson at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Alan Austin at Silver Lake Partners; Micah Avni of Jerusalem Global Ventures; Jonathan Axelrad at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati; Thomas Beaudoin at Testa, Hurwitz & Thibeault; Bill Campbell at Ater Wynne; Craig Dauchy at Cooley Godward Kronish; Ken DeAngelis at Austin Ventures; Alex Gould at Stanford Law School; Ryan Lester, formerly at O’Melveny & Myers; Andrei Manoliu; J.B. Pritzker; John Quigley at Nassau Capital; and Mark Tanoury at Cooley Godward Kronish. I owe special thanks to Susan Woodward at Sand Hill Econometrics for sharing data on VC performance with me.

Very useful comments were provided by Ken Bamberger, Eric Biber, Tino Cuéllar, Dan Farber, Jesse Shapiro, Matthew Stephenson, Adrian Vermeule, and John Yoo. Financial support has been provided by the Hellman Family Faculty Fund, the Boalt Hall Fund, UC Berkeley’s Committee on Research, and the Jerome Kutak Fund at The University of Chicago Law School. Thanks to Tess Hand-Bender, Roman Giverts, Monica Groat, Edna Lewis, Harry Moren, Stacey Nathan, and John Yow for research assistance. An earlier version of this Article was presented at the 2008 annual meeting of the American Law and Economics Association and in the UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Law and Society’s Speaker Series.

We thank Kenworthy Bilz, Bernard Harcourt, Owen Jones, Sarah Lawsky, Richard McAdams, Janice Nadler, Kitty Richards, Stephanie Stern, and Lior Strahilevitz for their comments and advice.

We thank Dawn M. Chutkow as well as participants in the Understanding Education in the United States Symposium at the University of Chicago Law School for comments on an earlier draft. Professor Sisk offers thanks to his assistant, Bethany Fletcher, for recording data coding and to law students Eric Beecher and Alicia Long for assistance with opinion coding. A spreadsheet containing our data set, regression run results, coding of each decision, coding of each judge, and code books may be found at http://courseweb.stthomas.edu/gcsisk /religion.study.data/cover.html.

We would like to thank Chad Garrett for his excellent assistance with gathering the data needed for this Article.