Over the past 20 years, net of fees, Kauffman has been paid out 1.31 times, on average, the amount that it invested in any given fund — well below the standard “venture rate of return” of twice committed capital.

In theory, if you believe the VC industry’s hype, the returns should look a bit like the green line: negative in early years, as you make investments which won’t pay off for a long time, and then positive by year 10.

In reality, reported returns peak very early on, in month 16 — which just happens to coincide with the point at which the GPs tend to start going out on sales calls, trying to raise their next fund. (The blue line shows total fund returns, while the red line shows returns net of fees — the money which actually goes to LPs.) Of course, at month 16, none of the returns are realized: they’re driven instead by increases in portfolio-company valuations, and those valuations are set by the GPs themselves.

Retailers that spend more on employees are seeing higher sales as a result, meaning cutting labour costs to the bone are counterproductive. Marshall Fisher, Jayanth Krishnan, and Serguei Netessine looked at detailed sales data from a retailer with more than five hundred stores, and found that every dollar in additional payroll led to somewhere between four and twenty-eight dollars in new sales.

Touches on the outsourcing of work to the customer.

The five factors that best predicted price growth between 2001 and 2011 were the share of adults with college degrees (positive correlation), housing permits per capita (strong negative correlation), median family income (strong negative correlation since poorer places experience faster economic growth), median housing value and the closest distance to the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico.

New paper compares saving rates and other success factors against how strongly their language incorporates future-time-reference(FTR). But because strong-FTR languages like English or Spanish make a greater distinction between the present and the future, we may be more likely to ignore long-term consequences and trends. But for a weak-FTR language, like German or Finnish, may make speakers feel like the future is more immediate.

Harvard economist empirically studying children and education.
- paying kids to get good grades has no effect on grades
- Five common elements to higher test scores: increased instructional time, data-driven instruction, feedback for teachers, tutoring (especially so), culture of high expectations
- emphasizes quick testing to keep results relevant