Entrepreneurship is essential to job creation and to productivity growth and therefore is an important matter for government policy. However, policymakers face a difficult challenge because successful growth for a few firms—which cannot easily be identified in advance—is accompanied by...

Since 1984 Informal Venture Networks (VCNs) have been formed and are currently operating in several states and Canada. However, little has been written in regard to the performance of these networks. This article presents the results of preliminary research concerning their performance. Our...

The research in small firms financing is characterized by a lack of a theoretical framework. One basic assumption in this study is that agency theory can provide an essential framework to explain the interaction between informal and formal venture capitalists and their portfolio firms. Five...

This study replicates substantial portions of a study entitled “Criteria Used by Venture Capitalists to Evaluate New Ventures Proposals” by MacMillan, Siegal, and SubbaNarasimha. Results were similar to the earlier work. The differences observed can be attributed to history effects caused by...

The 1986 Tax Reform Act eliminated preferential tax treatment of capital gains. Proposals to reinstate the preference suggest that risky new investment will suffer without favorable treatment of investment returns. Others have argued that capital for risky new ventures is largely supplied by...

The stock market return and the risk of 33 quoted European venture capital companies during the period 1977-1991 are studied. The return is negative on average with eight of the 33 companies having a return that is higher than the market return. However, the systematic risk (measured by the beta...

Though some casual empirical evidence exists, few empirical studies have examined venture capitalist attributes, diversification, and investment strategy. This paper provides an initial empirical examination of investment structure and how it relates to venture capitalist organizational form,...

This paper presents an empirical examination of the incentives motivating venture capitalists and sample of growth option intensive private firms with acute capital requirements to interact, the gains each group achieves through this association, the types of private firms successfully...

Despite the recent increase in research on informal venture capital there are many aspects of this market for which no information exists. One such issue is exits. This exploratory study is the first to address this issue. It is based on a survey of 38 active business angels in Finland who had...