The relationship between a venture capitalist and an entrepreneur is modeled to investigate the impact of public subsidies on venture capital investments in start-up enterprises. In this model, the venture capitalist only finances start-up enterprises if he has sufficient expertise to make...

We provide novel evidence on voting practices used by the investment committees of prominent venture capital investors in the U.S. A substantial share of these VCs use a voting rule for seed and early stage investments where a single `champion' is sufficient for the entire partnership to make an...

This paper surveys empirical and theoretical studies of various control mechanisms embedded in venture capital contracts. These mechanisms mitigate incentive problems and opportunistic behavior arising in the uncertain environment of financing young hightechnology enterprises that predominantly...

This paper examines the impact of venture capitalists' reputation building and experience accumulation on the genesis of venture capital markets. Venture capitalists must accumulate experience to successfully support high-technology enterprises. They must build reputation, i.e., a track record...

This paper analyses the impact of public equity schemes on venture capitalist's incentives to finance start-up enterprises and to support the management teams. In a double-sided moral hazard model, it is shown that experienced venture capitalists, who have already financed start-up enterprises,...

Using an agency framework, this paper examines advantages of offering venture capitalists a choice between public equity and loan schemes. Both schemes can be used to promote venture capital investments in hightechnology enterprises since they encourage inexperienced venture capitalists to...

Past work has shown that failure tolerance by principals has the potential to stimulate innovation, but has not examined how this affects which projects principals will start. We demonstrate that failure tolerance has an equilibrium price ― in terms of an investor's required share of equity...

Venture capital activity differs considerably across countries. Venture capital markets are highly developed in few countries, while these markets are almost nonexistent in many other countries. This paper examines the conditions that have to be fulfilled for liquid venture capital markets to...