A model of racial discrimination provides testable implications for two features of statistical discriminators: differential treatment of signals by race and heterogeneous experience that shapes perception. We construct an experiment in the U.S. rental apartment market that distinguishes statistical discrimination from taste-based discrimination. Responses from over 14,000 rental inquiries with varying applicant quality show that landlords treat identical information from applicants with African-American and white sounding names differently. This differential treatment varies by neighborhood racial composition and signal type in a way consistent with statistical discrimination and in contrast to patterns predicted by a model of taste-based discrimination.

We examine whether male investors are biased against female entrepreneurs. To do so, we use a proprietary dataset from AngelList covering fundraising startups. We find that female founders are less successful with male investors compared to observably similar male founders. In contrast, the same female founders are more successful than male founders with female investors. The results do not appear to be driven by differences across founder gender in startup quality, sector focus, or risk. Given that investors are predominately male, our results suggest that an increase in female investors is likely necessary to support an increase in female entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship, VC and IPOs for their comments. We are grateful to The Eugene M. Lang Entrepreneurship Center for financial support. Special thanks go to Jesse Reyes and Thomson Venture Economics, who provided the Venture Economics data and to Maryam Haque and Brendan Hughes of Dow Jones who provided LP Source. All errors are our own.

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Entrepreneurship, VC and IPOs for their comments. We are grateful to The Eugene M. Lang Entrepreneurship Center for financial support. Special thanks go to Jesse Reyes and Thomson Venture Economics, who provided the Venture Economics data and to Maryam Haque and Brendan Hughes of Dow Jones who provided LP Source. All errors are our own.

The deregulation of securities laws-in particular the National Securities Markets Improvement Act (NSMIA) of 1996-has increased the supply of private capital to late-stage private startups, which are now able to grow to a size that few private firms used to reach. NSMIA is one of a number of factors that have changed the going-public versus staying-private trade-off, helping bring about a new equilibrium where fewer startups go public, and those that do are older. This new equilibrium does not reflect an IPO market failure. Rather, founders are using their increased bargaining power vis-à-vis investors to stay private longer.

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