Corporations and the financing of innovation: The corporate venturing experience

During the past forty years, the media and academics have frequently maligned corporate investments in venture capital and highlighted visible failures. Many corporations' best ideas have languished, whether because of internal resistance or an inability to execute on the initial insight. In other cases, more nimble companies, often venture-backed start-ups, have turned corporations' innovative ideas into commercial successes. So how can companies best stimulate innovation in a corporate setting and replicate the success of the venture capital industry? ; This article explores the history, structure, and performance of corporate venture programs in the United States over the past forty years. The study shows that the U.S. corporate venture capital market has gone through three waves of activity that track the overall independent venture capital market. ; The author's analysis, using detailed microlevel data, finds that corporate venture investments are increasingly made in related industries. In addition, contrary to previous assumptions, corporate venture capital investments have, on average, been more successful than independent venture capital investments. This success is exclusively associated with strategic corporate venture investments. This study concludes that corporations appear to be learning many of the best practices from the independent venture capital sector.Venture capital ; Productivity ; Technology ; Economic development

What Drives Venture Capital Fundraising?

We examine the determinants of venture capital fundraising in the U.S. over the past twenty-five years. We study industry aggregate, state-level, and firm-specific fundraising to determine if macroeconomic, regulatory, or performance factors affect venture capital activity. We find that shifts in demand for venture capital appear to have a positive and important impact on commitments to new venture capital funds. Commitments by taxable and tax-exempt investors seem equally sensitive to changes in capital gains tax rates that decreases in capital gains tax rates increase the demand for venture capital as more workers are incented to become entrepreneurs. Aggregate and state level venture fundraising are positively affected by easing of pension investment restrictions as well as industrial and academic R&D expenditures. Fund performance and reputation also lead to greater fundraising by venture organizations.

The Really Long-Run Performance of Initial Public Offerings: The Pre-NASDAQ Evidence

Financial economists in recent years have closely examined and intensely debated the performance of initial public offerings using data after the formation of NASDAQ. The paper seeks to shed light on this controversy by undertaking a large, out-of-sample study: we examine the performance for up to five years after listing of nearly 3,661 initial public offerings in the United States from 1935 to 1972. The sample displays some evidence of underperformance when event-time buy-and-hold abnormal returns are used. The underperformance disappears, however, when cumulative abnormal returns are utilized. A calendar-time analysis also shows that over the entire sample period i.e., from 1935 to 1976 IPOs return as much as the market. Finally, the intercepts in CAPM and Fama-French three-factor regressions are insignificantly different from zero suggesting no abnormal performance.

Conflict of Interest in the Issuance of Public Securities: Evidence from Venture Capital

In this paper we investigate potential conflicts of interest in the issuance of public securities in a setting analogous to a universal bank, i.e., the underwriting of initial public offerings by investment banks that hold equity in a firm through a venture capital subsidiary. We contrast two hypotheses. Under anticipate the conflict. The suggests that investment banks are able to utilize superior information when they underwrite securities. The evidence supports the rational discounting hypothesis. Initial public offerings that are underwritten by affiliated investment banks perform as well or better than issues of firms in which none of the investment banks held a prior equity position. Investors do, however, require a greater discount at the offering to compensate for potential adverse selection. We also provide evidence that investment bank-affiliated venture firms address the potential conflict by investing in and subsequently underwriting less information-sensitive issues. Our evidence provides no support for the prohibitions on universal banking instituted by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933.

Incentives vs. Control: An Analysis of U.S. Dual-Class Companies

Dual-class common stock allows for the separation of voting rights and cash flow rights across the different classes of equity. We construct a large sample of dual-class firms in the United States and analyze the relationships of insider's cash flow rights and voting rights with firm value, performance, and investment behavior. We find that relationship of firm value to cash flow rights is positive and concave and the relationship to voting rights is negative and convex. Identical quadratic relationships are found for the respective ownership variables with sales growth, capital expenditures, and the combination of R&D and advertising. Our evidence is consistent with an entrenchment effect of voting control that leads managers to underinvest and an incentive effect of cash flow ownership that induces managers to pursue more aggressive strategies.

Large Blocks of Stock: Prevalence, Size, and Measurement

Large blocks of stock play an important role in many studies of corporate governance and finance. Despite this important role, there is no standardized data set for these blocks, and the best available data source, Compact Disclosure, has many mistakes and biases. In this paper, we document these mistakes and show how to fix them. The mistakes and bias tend to increase with the level of reported blockholdings: in firms where Compact Disclosure reports that aggregate blockholdings are greater than 50 percent, these aggregate holdings are incorrect more than half the time and average holdings for these incorrect firms are overstated by almost 30 percentage points. We also demonstrate that our fixes are economically and statistically significant in an analysis of the relationship between firm value and outside blockholders.