IPOs, Trade Sales and Liquidations: Modelling Venture Capital Exits Using Survival Analysis

Using a detailed sample made up of more than 20,000 investment rounds, we analyze the time to ‘IPO’, ‘trade sale’ and ‘liquidation’ for about 6,000 venture backed firms. We model these exit times using competing risks models. Biotech and internet firms have the fastest IPO exits. Internet firms are also the fastest to liquidate, while biotech firms are however the slowest. The conditional probability for IPOs are clearly non-monotonous with respect to time. As time flows, venture capital-backed firms first exhibit an increased likelihood of exiting to an IPO. However, after having reached a plateau, investments that have not yet exited have fewer and fewer possibilities of IPO exits as time increases. The bubble period from 1998 to 2000 was an ‘easy money’ period where venture capitalists gave much more money to firms, many of which did not offer outstanding growth potential as they tended to liquidate much faster than in normal times.IPO, trade sale, venture capital, exit, survival analysis

Bank Reputation in the Private Debt Market

We examine the impact of lead arrangers’ reputation on the design of loan contracts such as spread and fees charged. Controlling for the non-randomness of the lender-borrower match (self-selection bias), we find that the reputation of top tier arrangers leads to higher spreads, and that top tier arrangers retain larger fractions of their loans in their syndicates. These larger spreads are especially pronounced for borrowers without credit rating that have the most to gain from the certification assumed by virtue of a loan contract with a top tier arranger. This certification channel differs from the one found in public markets, where certification leads to a reduced spread offered to the best clients. These differences between public and private markets can be explained by differences in the way they operate and are structured. Interestingly, the effect is strongest for transactions done after the changes in the banking regulations (including the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994) that led to significant consolidations in the banking industry, including among the largest commercial banks.private debt;syndicated loans;bank reputation;syndication;certification

On the Strategic Use of Corporate Venture Financing for Securing Demand

In this paper, we focus on the strategic role of corporate venture financing by a corporation in securing own demand. When the headquarter finances the venture through the corporate venture capitalist, he commits himself to compensate the venture for the effort to increase the complementarity between its product and the headquarter's product. The headquarter therefore faces the following trade-off: either be more aggressive ex post in the product market (by undercutting more its rivals) or use corporate venture financing to affect the venture's product innovation outcome to weaken ex post competition with substitute products. This allows him to secure demand for his own product.

Tranching in the Syndicated Loan Market

We use data comprising over 100,000 loans from 115 countries during 1995-2009 to examine factors that affect the extent of loan tranching, and the range of tranche spreads. The data show five factors that drive them: asymmetric information, borrower risk, transaction costs, the presence of institutional investors, and the legal system. Tranching is more extensive and generates greater differences in spreads between tranches of a same loan when asymmetric information and risk are more pronounced. Economic and institutional factors driving tranching are more directly applicable to non-investment grade loans. For developing countries, the data highlight factors that affect the extent of tranching but such factors show little sensitivity to the pricing of the relative spreads.Loan;Debt finance;Tranche;Law and finance

The Emergence of Crowdinvesting in Europe

This paper first presents the development of the crowdinvesting market in Europe since its start in 2007. Then, using hand-collected data on the complete set of crowdinvesting campaigns run in Germany, the paper shows that successful campaigns tend to be launched by new startups and when the minimum ticket size is small so that more crowd investors can participate. Moreover, the use of the partiarisches Darlehen (a specific form of equity-linked notes not subject to prospectus regulation) adopted at the end of 2012 in Germany (as a response to alleviating regulatory constraints) has led to larger amounts being raised but also campaigns becoming more likely to achieve their targets. These two results combined indicate that contractual arrangements that enable more participation from the crowd tend to work best. Finally, campaigns launched on portals already having some experience are more likely to raise larger amounts. These findings should be of use to entrepreneurs who need to choose among a larger range of different crowdinvesting portals

Should Securities Regulation Promote Crowdinvesting?

In this paper, we show that too strong investor protection may harm small firms and entrepreneurial initiatives, which contrasts with the traditional ‘law & finance’ view that stronger investor protection is better. This situation is particularly relevant in crowdinvesting, which refers to a recent financial innovation originating on the Internet and targets small, innovative firms. In many jurisdictions, securities regulation offers exemptions to prospectus and registration requirements. We provide an into-depth discussion of recent regulatory reforms in different countries and discuss how they may impact crowdinvesting. Building on a theoretical framework, we show that optimal regulation depends on the availability of alternative early-stage financing such as venture capital and angel finance. Finally, we offer exploratory portal-level evidence from Germany on the impact of securities regulation on small business finance

Internationalization of business angel investments: The role of investor experience

In this study, we examine business angels (BAs)’ appetite for investing abroad and the role played by investment and entrepreneurial experience. To investigate BAs’ propensity to internationalize their investments, we study cross-border deals and culturally distant investments. Using an international sample of US and European BA deals, we find that both individual investment and entrepreneurial experience foster the internationalization of BAs’ investments, consistent with the predictions based upon the local bias theory. When splitting experience into domestic and foreign, we find that the former increases while the latter decreases local bias. When we separate US and European BAs, we find that the experiential background of BAs does not matter in the same way in Europe and in the US: while the general results are confirmed in Europe, both investment and entrepreneurial experience have a reduced impact in the US. We interpret these results in light of the reduced risk aversion of US BAs that lowers transaction costs

Soft-collinear gravity with fermionic matter

We extend the effective field theory for soft and collinear gravitons to interactions with fermionic matter fields. The full theory features a local Lorentz symmetry in addition to the usual diffeomorphisms, which requires incorporating the former into the soft-collinear gravity framework. The local Lorentz symmetry gives rise to Wilson lines in the effective theory that strongly resemble those in SCET for non-abelian gauge interactions, whereas the diffeomorphisms can be treated in the same fashion as in the case of scalar matter. The basic structure of soft-collinear gravity, which features a homogeneous soft background field, giving rise to a covariant derivative and multipole-expanded covariant Riemann-tensor interactions, remains unaltered and generalises in a natural way to fermion fields.Comment: v2: 27 pages, matches published versio