The amount requested, AMOUNT REQ, was extracted either from the planning documents or from communications between the FVC and the requesting firm. Forty percent of firms did not request a specific amount of money. The dummy
variable D AMOUNT REQ took the value one if the planning document contained a specific request and zero otherwise. Conditional on the presence of an amount, the average request sought $3.47M. Because this variable is highly skewed (the maximum is $60M), we use the natural log of the amount requested (measured in thousands of dollars) in our regression analysis