Suchergebnisse

The terms venture capital and private equity may differ across countries. This book discusses venture capital not only as risk capital toward unlisted companies with the aim to enhance the investee firm, but also analyses broader forms of entrepreneurial investment: from early stage financing to buyout and turnaround transaction. This book is divided into four sections. The first section aims to shed light on the terminology and offers a comparison between private equity/venture capital, and the traditional banking sector as financing sources. The second section details the differences between private equity and venture capital transactions on the basis of firm life cycle, and summarizes the main characteristics of both private equity and venture capital investors and investee firms. The third section illustrates the evolution of the private equity and venture capital industry before and after the financial crisis by looking at three fundamental aspects: fundraising, investment and divestment, all in terms of volume and trends. The last section discusses the basic elements of corporate valuation applied to private equity and venture capital industry, with some practical examples.

AbstractIn this article we investigate the determining factors of bank monitoring in small business lending. Unlike previous studies that rely on proxies of a bank's monitoring effort, we use a large and unique data set that includes the number of monitoring contacts per year between a European bank and a large number of small firms from 2009 to 2012. Our main results highlight that the frequency of a bank's monitoring effort is negatively related to the firm's reputation and the strength of the bank–firm relationship, and positively related to the bank–borrower proximity and the borrower's credit risk level.

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of being located in a science park (SP) on the level of a firm's intellectual capital (IC) performance.


Design/methodology/approach
– Using a sample of 183 Italian firms (i.e. 61 tenant and 122 non-tenant firms), and through the GLS technique, the authors regress the firms' IC performance across various explicative variables including a dummy that discriminates tenant and non-tenant firms.


Findings
– Consistently with expectations, the results show that the location of a firm in a SP leads to improved IC performance. Moreover, the authors find that some other firm characteristics, such as size, age, and leverage, are important predictors of its IC-based performance.


Research limitations/implications
– The sample is small and the impact on performance might be biased by factors related to the regional context (e.g. level of industrialization, quality of education, and science system).


Practical implications
– Implications for policy makers: support the growth of firms in SPs especially in those industries full of firms with scarce performance in IC. Implications for SP managers: they could "sell" (in terms of marketing) to both entrepreneurs to attract and policy makers this result. Implications for institutional investors: they should look at SPs with greater interest to find high-quality firms and improve their screening activity.


Originality/value
– This paper aims to extend literature about factors explaining the level of a firm's IC performance and the current understanding of the impact of SPs at firm level.