We analyze how entrepreneurial firms choose between two funding institution: banks, which monitor less intensively and face liquidity demands from their own investors, and venture capitalists, who can monitor more intensively but face a higher cost of capital because of the liquidity constraints that they impose on their own investors. Because the firm’s manager prefers continuing the firm over...

The purpose of this literature review is to document academic research concerning factors influencing the performances of venture capital funds, as well as the venture capital fundraising decisions. Industry specialisation, large fund sizes, strong deal flow, syndication of investments, and especially, experience, all appear to be factors leading to superior investment performance, which is par...

— The institution of venture capitalism is a difficult one to initiate through policy intervention, particularly in developing countries with unstable macroeconomic environments and histories of state involvement in the use of national capital and in the composition of production. India has all these constraints. The emergence of a thriving software services industry after 1985 created the raw ...

This article shows that investors financing a portfolio of projects may use the depth of their financial pockets to overcome entrepreneurial incentive problems. Competition for scarce informed capital at the refinancing stage strengthens investors’ bargaining positions. And yet, entrepreneurs’ incentives may be improved, because projects funded by investors with ‘‘shallow pockets’’ must have no...

Must policymakers seeking to replicate the success of Silicon Valley’s venture capital market first replicate other US institutions, such as deep and liquid stock markets? Or can legal reforms alone make a significant difference? In this paper, we compare the economic and legal determinants of venture capital investment, fundraising and exits. We introduce a cross-sectional and time series empi...

Research on what determines the performance of start-up companies is characterized by a sharp debate in the literature of economic sociology and the sociology of the economy. There is one extreme view proposing that in the long run, a rational market takes care of allocating scarce resources such as venture capital funding to the most potentially profitable and exciting business plans. By contr...

I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. The importance of social capital can be characterized by a well-known quote: " it's not just what you know, but whom you know". Firms with rich social cap...

To what extent do venture capital (VC) investors use information from patents to assess the quality of new ventures? Using a sample of 370 U.S. semiconductor start-ups, we examine when patents improve the terms by which new firms access venture capital.

Venture capitalists are investing their money in portfolio enterprises and hence are putting their capital at risk. As portfolio enterprises may pursue different objectives than those of their financiers, venture capitalists may perceive agency problems as an important risk factor. Venture capitalists can limit the scope of these risks by specifying the form of financing that they provide to po...