Provincial Preferences in Private Equity

This paper identifies a strong tendency for Canadian private equity investors to finance entrepreneurs that reside in the same province. For all types of investors and entrepreneurial firms, in terms of the number of investments (13,729 transactions), 84.42% of investments were intra-provincial. In terms of the total value of these transactions ($20,193,896,909 in 1997 dollars), 61.15% of the investment value was intra-provincial. We provide evidence that both agency costs and information asymmetries systematically give rise to differences in the frequency of inter- versus intra-provincial investments, and compare the importance of agency versus institutional factors leading to home bias