Evidence from private U.S. companies

Armstrong, Da´vila, Foster, and Hand (‘‘ADFH’’) use a proprietary venture capital database of revenue and profit projections submitted by young firms seeking financing to attempt to address a number of questions related to forecasts by managers of early stage, venture-backed, private entrepreneurial firms. The proprietary dataset together with the creative use of a ‘‘historicallygrounded conditional projections’’ methodology are the most interesting features of ADFH’s study. However, these same aspects give rise to empirical design constraints that the study does not fully overcome. In addition, there are numerous leaps of logic required to arrive at some of ADFH’s conclusions and there are alternative explanations for ADFH’s findings that have not been entirely refuted. This leaves the reader with some doubt as to whether all of ADFH’s conclusions are fully substantiated. Nevertheless, the evidence presented makes an interesting contribution to our understanding of the forecasting behavior of young, private, rapidly growing, VCbacked firms, and provides some natural economic and methodological leads into further studies of these issues.

阿姆斯特朗、达维拉、福斯特与汉德（以下简称ADFH）借助一套由寻求融资的初创企业提交的营收与利润预测专有创业投资数据库，尝试解答一系列与早期获创业投资支持的私营创业企业管理者的预测行为相关的问题。该专有数据集，结合其创新性地采用的“基于历史依据的条件预测”（historically grounded conditional projections）方法，是ADFH研究最具吸引力的核心亮点。然而，正是这两大核心特质也带来了实证设计层面的局限，而该研究并未完全克服这些局限。此外，要得出ADFH的部分结论，需要进行多次逻辑跳跃；且针对ADFH研究发现的其他合理解释尚未被完全驳倒。这使得读者对ADFH的全部结论是否得到充分佐证存有疑虑。尽管如此，该研究呈现的证据仍为我们理解初创私营、高速增长且获创业投资支持的企业的预测行为做出了有益贡献，并为上述议题的后续研究提供了自然的经济学与方法论研究线索。