I didn't read the paper, but as a referee the first thing I'm thinking is whether institutional investors in the other G7 countries are also barred from VC from the 70s to the 2000s, which is where their chart shows the divergence.

Obviously many other things happened in the 70s so it's hard to say for sure that this was definitely due to ERISA. It's plausible though that it had a major effect 



SimpleStacker

econ

The Economic Impact of Venture Capital: Evidence from Public Companies

k00b

I'm not even positing an alternate hypothesis, although I think it would be easy enough to formulate one.

Whenever I work with financial time series, there's a structural break in the early 70's that completely baffles everyone else. They assume something significant must have happened in that sector, rather than think about how the whole monetary system changed.