Professor Paul Gompers

Paul Gompers, Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, specializes in research on financial issues related to start-up, high growth, and newly public companies. Professor Gompers has an appointment in both the Finance and Entrepreneurial Management areas. He received his A.B. summa cum laude in biology from Harvard College in 1987. After spending a year working as a research biochemist for Bayer Chemical AG, he attended Oxford University on a Marshall Fellowship where he received an M.Sc. in economics. He completed his Ph.D. in Business Economics at Harvard University in 1993. Professor Gompers spent two years as an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Graduate School of Business, the University of Chicago where he created a new course entitled "Entrepreneurial Finance and Management." His course development efforts at the Harvard Business School focuses on issues affecting entrepreneurial firms and their investors.


His research focuses on the structure, governance, and performance of private equity funds; sources of financing, incentive design, and performance of private firms; and long-run performance evaluation for newly public companies. His work on private equity funds has examined the relationship between general partners and their portfolio companies. (Much of his research is collected in The Venture Capital Cycle, forthcoming from MIT Press.) Gompers has investigated factors affecting the structure, timing, and monitoring activities by the general partner and how these factors affect the success or failure of entrepreneurial firms. Similarly, he has examined the relationship between institutional investors and private equity fund managers. This work has examined a large collection of partnership agreements and examined issues of compensation, covenants and restrictions, as well as distribution policy and performance. Other research efforts examine the institutional and market factors that influence the performance of newly public companies. He is a Faculty Research Fellow in the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Corporate Finance Program.