OLA BENGTSSON

Welcome to my homepage!

I am an Assistant professor of finance at the College of Business at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Prior to this appointment, I was on the faculty of the Johnson School at Cornell University. I hold MBA and PhD degrees in finance from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago and an undergraduate degree from the Stockholm School of Economics. My dissertation, which was awarded with a Kauffman dissertation award, focused on why serial founders enter into repeated financing relationships with venture capital investors.

My current research centers around understanding how venture capitalists select, contract with and compensate entrepreneurs. I study these questions from the corporate finance lens by applying statistical methods to mostly hand-collected datasets of U.S. venture capital investments. I have written a number of papers on venture capital contracts, in which I explore the empirical determinants of these complex legal documents and the implications of various deal terms. My papers can be downloaded from this webpage or from SSRN (click on links in the menu). I am an ad-hoc referee for Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial Intermediation, Management Science and Journal of Business Venturing. I am an Affiliated Researcher with the Institute for Financial Research (SIFR) in Sweden.

At UIUC I will teach one elective course on venture capital and one elective course buyouts to masters students and undergraduates. At Cornell I taught three different electives in entrepreneurial finance, all of which targeted 2nd year MBA students who are either interested in a career as venture capitalists, buyout managers or entrepreneurs, or just want to learn more about how financial decisions are made in private equity markets. The syllabi for these courses can be downloaded from this page (click on "Course Syllabi" in the menu). I was also the faculty advisor to the student-run BR Incubator, in which about 40 MBA students each year help companies to develop business plans and grow their operations.

I was born and raised in southern Sweden where my family still lives. Prior to starting my undergraduate studies, I served in the Swedish military as an Human Intelligence officer specialized on the Russian Armed Forces. I also lived more than a year in Moscow (Russia) where I worked at the Swedish Embassy and at ABN Amro. I have also studied mathematics at the Free University in Berlin (Germany). I am fluent in Swedish and English and have high proficiency in Russian and German. I am married and since December 2007 also a father. I enjoy running and other outdoor activities.