Nothing Ventured - Nothing Gained? Empirical Evidence on Venture Capital Financing in Switzerland

Venture Capital, Entrepreneurship, Syndication

What drives Venture Capital Syndication

This paper analyses the syndication behavior of VC organisations and the factors influencing their overall propensity to co-invest. We develop hypothesis concerning the investment behavior of Venture Capitalists in the German market and compare these hypothesis to the actual empirical evidence from a data set including 2,500 VC investments. We find that the underlying theories of financial and resource driven motives can indeed be used to explain the observed behavior for syndicated venture capital investments. We show that mainly Resource driven motives foster the propensity to syndicate an investment. Additionally, we find that Venture Capital Firms tend to diversify their portfolio, such that both motives of venture capital syndication (Finance and Resource driven) seem to be present at the same time and play a significant role simultaneously for the decision to jointly co-invest. We find evidence that a lower level of experience and expertise fosters the need to syndicate an investment.Venture Capital, Syndication

Do Differences in Institutional and Legal Environments Explain Cross-Country Variations in IPO Underpricing?

We empirically analyze the determinants of Initial Public Offering (IPO) underpricing using panel data for 29 countries over the period 1988-2005. Our hypotheses stress the importance of institutional and legal factors in explaining cross-country variations. We find that increased protection of shareholders and greater accounting transparency contribute negatively to variations in underpricing. When more information is available price discovery is facilitated, allowing for more effective corporate governance. Moreover, when equity markets perform well, investors anticipate companies and investment banks to time the market and require higher underpricing in return. Overall, we conclude that better investor protection and better institutional environments reduce the perceived risk of investing, and attenuate the problem of asymmetric information, thereby causing lower underpricing across countries.IPO underpricing, institutions, legal infrastructure, panel data

Balancing act between research and application: how research orientation and networks affect scholars’ academic and commercial output

Scholars’ balancing act between research and application leads to trade-offs between commercial and research output. Yet what some scholars may consider as poles apart might lead to super-additive outcomes for others. Based on a survey carried out at three leading European universities of technology we investigate the influence of scholars’ research orientation and networks on their output productivity. Our results point to a very specific group of ambidextrous scholars that is comparatively small. The scholars in this group are able to successfully balance research and application. In contrast, all scholars focusing on either pure basic or pure applied research face a trade-off between publications and innovations. In general, our findings suggest that the output productivity of all scholars is the higher the better their research orientation fits with their network activities. In particular, ambidextrous scholars rely on effectively accessing and utilizing their network to increase commercial and research output

Predicting outcomes in crowdfunding campaigns with textual, visual, and linguistic signals

This paper introduces a neural network and natural language processing approach to predict the outcome of crowdfunding startup pitches using text, speech, and video metadata in 20,188 crowdfunding campaigns. Our study emphasizes the need to understand crowdfunding from an investor’s perspective. Linguistic styles in crowdfunding campaigns that aim to trigger excitement or are aimed at inclusiveness are better predictors of campaign success than firm-level determinants. At the contrary, higher uncertainty perceptions about the state of product development may substantially reduce evaluations of new products and reduce purchasing intentions among potential funders. Our findings emphasize that positive psychological language is salient in environments where objective information is scarce and where investment preferences are taste based. Employing enthusiastic language or showing the product in action may capture an individual’s attention. Using all technology and design-related crowdfunding campaigns launched on Kickstarter, our study underscores the need to align potential consumers’ expectations with the visualization and presentation of the crowdfunding campaign

And the credit goes to … - Ghost and honorary authorship among social scientists

The proliferation of team-authored academic work has led to the proliferation of two kinds of authorship misconduct: ghost authorship, in which contributors are not listed as authors and honorary authorship, in which non-contributors are listed as authors. Drawing on data from a survey of 2,222 social scientists from around the globe, we study the prevalence of authorship misconduct in the social sciences. Our results show that ghost and honorary authorship occur frequently here and may be driven by social scientists’ misconceptions about authorship criteria. Our results show that they frequently deviate from a common point of authorship reference (the ICMJE authorship criteria). On the one hand, they tend to award authorship more broadly to more junior scholars, while on the other hand, they may withhold authorship from senior scholars if those are engaged in collaborations with junior scholars. Authorship misattribution, even if it is based on a misunderstanding of authorship criteria rather than egregious misconduct, alters academic rankings and may constitute a threat to the integrity of science. Based on our findings, we call for journals to implement contribution disclosures and to define authorship criteria more explicitly to guide and inform researchers as to what constitutes authorship in the social sciences. Our results also hold implications for research institutions, universities, and publishers to move beyond authorship-based citation and publication rankings in hiring and tenure processes and instead to focus explicitly on contributions in team-authored publications

The influence of socio-cultural environments on the performance of nascent entrepreneurs:community culture, motivation, self-efficacy and start-up success

The importance of informal institutions and in particular culture for entrepreneurship is a subject of ongoing interest. Past research has mostly concentrated on cross-national comparisons, cultural values and the direct effects of culture on entrepreneurial behaviour, but in the main found inconsistent results. We add a fresh perspective to this research stream by turning attention to community-level culture and cultural norms. We hypothesize indirect effects of cultural norms on venture emergence: Community-level cultural norms (performance-based culture and socially supportive institutional norms) impact important supply-side variables (entrepreneurial self-efficacy and entrepreneurial motivation) which in turn influence nascent entrepreneurs' success in creating operational ventures (venture emergence). We test our predictions on a unique longitudinal dataset, tracking nascent entrepreneurs' venture creation efforts over a five-year time span, and find evidence supporting them. Our research contributes to a more fine-grained understanding of how culture, in particular perceptions of community cultural norms, influences venture emergence. Based on these findings, we discuss how venture creation efforts can be supported. Our research highlights the embeddedness of entrepreneurial behaviour and its immediate antecedent beliefs in the local, community context

The Pervasive Role of Campaign and Product-Related Uncertainties in Inhibiting Crowdfunding Success

In this research, we study the funding decision in crowdfunding from the perspective of potential backers. We assess whether perceived uncertainty affects the decision to contribute to crowdfunding campaigns. For this purpose, we conduct a 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment with different stages of product development and the perceived innovativeness of products depicted in campaigns. Our findings show that an early development stage positively affects perceived uncertainty, adversely affecting the willingness to contribute. Simultaneously, higher perceived innovativeness elicits higher uncertainty perceptions, negatively influencing the willingness to contribute. Our research furthers an understanding of entrepreneur perspective taking to overcome uncertainty perceptions from the indeterminacy of crowdfunding campaigns

When teams of employees spin-off partnerships: matching-technology, information structure, and the “pure” incubator effect

The successful foundation of entrepreneurial firms comprises a multitude of complementary human tasks. The effect of founders’ human capital on firm success hinges on the information structure that prevails when nascent entrepreneurs are matched in partnerships. Empirically, we assume that rational matching occurs in incubated spin-offs and corporate-sponsored ventures. The human capital structure in such firms significantly differs from that of Greenfield projects. Using coarsened exact matching (CEM), we compute weights to level out these differences in human capital endowments. The impact of corporate support in founding the new firm is positive and increases as CEM-weights are applied to more of our human capital variables