Which Factors Matter Most? Microtargeting Startup Valuations

This summary covers two papers. The first is a paper examining the relationship between sovereign credit ratings and investor protection legislation. The paper finds that higher levels of investor protection are associated with stronger sovereign credit ratings.   The second is a paper which compares the use of econometrics to the use of machine learning algorithms to estimate the pre-money valuation of startups. The paper finds that microtargeting, which is the use of machine learning approaches on categorical data, is able to estimate valuation as accurately as traditional econometric approaches.