Starting a firm with expansive potential is an option for educated and high-skilled workers. This option serves as an insurance against unemployment caused by labor market frictions and hence increases the incentives for education. We show within a matching model that reducing the start-up costs...

Starting a firm with expansive potential is an option for educated and high-skilled workers. This option serves as an insurance against unemployment caused by labor market frictions and hence increases the incentives for education. We show within a matching model that reducing the start-up costs...

Venture capital markets are characterized by multiple incentive problems and asymmetric information in an uncertain environment. All kinds of agency problems are present: moral hazard, adverse selection, hold-up problems, window dressing, etc. Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists enter into...

We analyze the venture capitalist's decision on the timing of the IPO, the offer price and the fraction of shares he sells in the course of the IPO. A venture capitalist may decide to take a company public or to liquidate it after one or two financing periods. A longer venture capitalist's...

The paper explores factors that influence the design of financing contracts between venture capital investors and European venture capital funds. 122 Private Placement Memoranda and 46 Partnership Agreements are investigated in respect to the use of covenant restrictions and compensation...

This paper proposes an intertemporal model of venture capital investment with screening and advising where the venture capitalist's time endowment is the scarce input factor. Screening improves the selection of firms receiving finance, advising allows firms to develop a marketable product, both...

This paper analyzes whether differences in institutional structures on capital markets contribute to explaining why some OECD-countries, in particular the Anglo-Saxon countries, have been much more successful over the last two decades in producing employment growth and in reducing unemployment...

We consider the provision of venture capital in a dynamic agency model. In particular, we focus on the interaction between venture capital financing and product market competition: A young firm with a risky innovation project attempts to enter a market where it faces two periods of price...

This paper compares the post-investment value-added activities performed by governmental venture capital (GVC) and independent venture capital (IVC) for their portfolio companies, and controls for the selection effect that the different investment profiles of these investors might have on the...

We study how public policy can contribute to increase the share of early stage and high-tech venture capital investments, thus helping the development of active venture capital markets. A simple extension of the seminal model by Holmstrom and Tirole (1997) provides a theoretical base for our...