Networking Frictions in Venture Capital, and the Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship

Sabrina T. Howell and Ramana Nanda

No 26449, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Exploiting random variation in the number of venture capitalist (VC) judges assigned to panels at Harvard Business School’s New Venture Competition (NVC) between 2000 and 2015, we find that exposure to more VC judges increases male participants’ chances of founding a VC-backed startup after HBS much more than this exposure increases female participants’ chances. A survey suggests this is in part because male participants more often proactively reach out to VC judges after the NVC. Our results suggest that networking frictions are an important reason men benefit more than women from exposure to VCs. Such frictions can help explain part of the gender gap in entrepreneurship, and also have implications for how to design networking opportunities to facilitate financing of the best (rather than just the best networked) ideas.

JEL-codes: D83 D85 G24 J16 L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cfn, nep-ent and nep-lab
Note: CF PR
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w26449.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Networking Frictions in Venture Capital, and the Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship (2024)
Working Paper: Networking Frictions in Venture Capital, and the Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:26449

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w26449

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().