This dissertation includes three essays with a series of empirical investigations in areas of entrepreneurial finance and commodity markets.In... Show moreThis dissertation includes three essays with a series of empirical investigations in areas of entrepreneurial finance and commodity markets.In the first essay, I study the impact of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on investment in new and emerging technology firms. My findings indicate negative post-GDPR effect after its 2018 rollout on EU ventures, relative to their US counterparts, but no such effects following its 2016 enactment.In the second essay, I examine how investors’ tendency to prefer investing in local ventures interacts with the effects of the GDPR on venture investment in EU. I demonstrate that GDPR’s enactment and rollout differentially affect investors as a function of their proximity to ventures. Specifically, I show that GDPR’s rollout in 2018 has a negative effect on EU venture investment and the effects are higher when ventures and lead investors are not in the same country or union. The relationship manifests in the number of deals per month and in the amount invested per deal, and is particularly pronounced for newer and data-related ventures.In the third essay, I formulate two claims about spot and futures return prediction in industrial metal futures market. These claims lead to testable hypotheses, and provide theory-based restrictions for the coefficients of spot and futures return regression. I investigate six industrial metals and find empirical support for my hypotheses. The in-sample and out-of-sample evidence shows that financial variables, proxies for global economic activities, and the basis predict futures and spot price returns consistently with my hypotheses. Furthermore, my out-of-sample trading experiments document economic significance of the restrictions. Show less
