Ehsan Mahdikhani

I am a Ph.D. student in the Finance Department at the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE) and the Swedish House of Finance.

I will be on the 2025-2026 Job Market.

Job market paper: Why Venture Later? Incentives, Learning, and Industry Allocation in VC Funds

Abstract: Why do venture funds enter new high-tech industries later than is socially best? I structurally estimate a two-period model on fund-level data. Two frictions explain the delay. Inside deals, managers need credible early evidence, but monitoring is costly, so they do too little. Between investors and managers, LPs cannot verify or directly reward that monitoring, so incentives under-provide it. Estimating the model on matched pairs of funds shows the first friction reduces the share of capital allocated to new sectors, while the second keeps monitoring too low and limits the scale of those investments. Combined frictions imply average losses of about $37B per year (approximately 2.8% of VC and 12% of new-sector capital in my sample). Policy tools, an exploration bonus for managers, temporary public risk-sharing, and lower-cost funding for new-sector deals, raise early exploration and investment scale, especially when combined.