Date & Time：September 18, 2019 10:00 - 11:30a.m.
Venue：SEM 411 Meeting Room
Speaker：Veikko Thiele（Queen's University）
Inviter：Suting Hong
Abstract：
This paper examines the effect of investor power in a model of staged equity financing. It shows how the usual effect where market power reduces valuations can be reversed in later rounds. Once they become insiders, powerful investors may use their market power to increase, not decrease valuations. Even though powerful investors initially lower valuations, companies prefer to bring them inside to leverage their power in later financing rounds. The paper also makes predictions about investor returns, and issues a warning that unrealized interim returns can be misleading predictors of final realized returns when powerful investors distort interim valuations.
Speaker Biography：
Dr. Veikko Thiele is Associate Professor and Smith Distinguished Faculty Fellow of Business Economics at Smith School of Business. His research focuses on entrepreneurial finance, with the main emphasis on the interplay between different financial resources for start-up companies, such as angel investments and venture capital. In another stream of his research, Dr. Thiele examines performance evaluations and the efficient design of incentive schemes in organizations. His work has been published or is forthcoming in leading international journals, including the Journal of Financial Economics, the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, and Labour Economics. He is the 2014 recipient of Smith New Researcher Achievement Award.
Before he joined Smith in the summer of 2009, Dr. Thiele was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia, where he was nominated for the Commerce Undergraduate Society's Teaching Excellence Award in 2008. Dr. Thiele received his PhD in Economics from Humboldt University Berlin in 2006.
