I'm an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Darden School of Business, University of Virginia.
My research interests are in empirical corporate finance and financial intermediation. Specifically, I'm interested in venture capital and private equity.
I teach electives on Venture Capital in the MBA and EMBA curriculum.
Contact: abuzovr@darden.virginia.edu
Busy Venture Capitalists and Investment Performance
Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Forthcoming
This paper studies the impact of limited attention on investment decisions by venture capitalists (VCs). I find that startups funded by VCs during VCs' IPO engagements tend to underperform: these startups are 9% less likely to go public or become acquired and have lower exit multiples. The effects of VCs' busyness cluster around the active phase of the IPO engagement and are more pronounced in cases of higher workload intensity or higher information asymmetry. Overall, this performance gap induced by attention constraints provides new evidence on VCs' ability to identify investment opportunities at the initial screening stage.
Presentations: SFS Cavalcade North America 2020, PERC Private Equity Research Symposium (Oxford, 2019), Annual Private Capital Research Conference (Montreux, 2019), KWC Conference on Entrepreneurial Finance (Lund, 2019), FMA (2019), BI Oslo, Copenhagen Business School, U of Lausanne, HKU Business School, IE Business School, Tilburg, U of Amsterdam, U of Geneva, U of Iowa Tippie College of Business, UVA Darden, VU Amsterdam
Media coverage: Institutional Investor, Canadian Investment Review
The Value of Privacy and the Choice of Limited Partners by Venture Capitalists with Will Gornall and Ilya Strebulaev
Journal of Financial Economics, Volume 169 (2025)
We study how information disclosure concerns shape the choice of limited partners (LPs) by venture capitalists (VCs). Late-2002 court rulings prevented public LPs from providing confidentiality to investment managers. The best-performing VCs, but not other managers, responded by excluding public LPs from their new funds. Lost access reduced public LP returns by $1.6 billion relative to $14 billion of their VC commitments. Legislation reducing disclosure, contracts limiting information access, and added fund-of-funds intermediaries helped restore access. These changes focused on protecting portfolio company information, highlighting the importance of proprietary information for VC investing and the potential costs of transparency.
Presentations: 34th Mitsui Finance Symposium (2023), SFS Cavalcade North America 2023, MFA 2023, IPC Spring Research Symposium 2023, Commonwealth Finance Workshop 2022, European FA 2022 (Barcelona), PERC Private Equity Research Symposium (Oxford, 2022), Esade Business School*, Stanford PhD Seminar
* co-author
Media coverage: The FinReg Blog
Do Banks Compete on Non-Price Terms? Evidence from Loan Covenants with Christoph Herpfer and Roberto Steri
Revise and Resubmit, Journal of Finance
We investigate the tradeoff between control rights tied to loan covenants and cash flow rights from interest rates. We exploit a regulatory shock that restricted banks, but not non-banks, from offering covenant-lite loans. In response, affected banks increased covenant provisions while reducing interest rates relative to non-banks. We estimate a "dollar value of covenants" around 2.5%, or $15mln annually for the average loan. This value rises with borrowers' demand for flexibility and falls with lenders' ability to monitor covenants. Stricter non-price terms drive financially weaker borrowers toward shadow banks or out of the leveraged lending market, reducing banks' market share.
Presentations: ABFER 2023*, Regulating Financial Markets Conference* (Frankfurt am Main, 2022), SFS Cavalcade North America 2022*, AFA 2021 (Chicago)*, EFA 2020 (Helsinki), MFA 2020 (Chicago)*, 8th Empirical Financial Intermediation (EFI) Workshop (2019)*, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta (2018)*, Central Bank of Ireland (2018), Emory (2018)*, GeorgiaTech (2018)*, U of Lausanne (2018)
* co-author
Overallocated Investors and Secondary Transactions with Aleks Andonov and Josh Lerner
We study how portfolio rebalancing needs drive secondary transactions of illiquid stakes in private equity (PE) partnerships. To identify secondary sales of limited partner (LP) interests, we use the return reporting patterns of public investors for funds underlying their portfolio. We find that pensions overallocated in PE tend to sell their stakes in the secondary market, rather than increasing their target allocation or reducing the number of new commitments. The evidence from the distribution of discounts highlights the costs of this denominator effect due to self-imposed portfolio rebalancing policies at public plans.
Presentations: IPC Spring Research Symposium 2024 (UNC, Chapel Hill), Private Capital Symposium at London Business School*, Annual Private Markets Conference (Lausanne)*, The Law and Finance of Private Equity and Venture Capital Conference (UPenn), 5th LTI@UniTO/Bank of Italy Workshop on Long-term investors’ trends: theory and practice (Rome), The Ninth Public Investors Conference (Singapore), Inquire Europe Autumn Seminar 2024 (Valencia)
* co-author
Selling to Yourself: Continuation Vehicles in Private Equity with Will Gornall, Sophie Shive, Ilya Strebulaev, and Mike Weisbach
This paper presents the first study of an emerging market trend: managers selling assets from one of their funds into a new continuation vehicle (CV) they manage, with existing limited partners being able to cash out or continue to hold. We comment on agency theories by analyzing data on continuation funds and transferred assets. CVs tend to be used by more successful funds and general partners and appear to contain higher quality assets, potentially as a response to asymmetric information challenges. Flexibility appears to be a key driver of limited partner investment decisions, with fund of funds being more likely to participate in CVs.
Presentations: IPC Workshop, Institute for Private Capital's Spring Research Symposium 2025