The investment strategies of publicly sponsored venture capital funds (стр. 6 )

Table 8 – Standard duration model and competing risk models. Dependent variable: duration of the investment. Coefficients reported.

	Duration model	Competing risk models
	Risk: any IRRs	Risk: IRR<0	Risk: -1<IRR<hurdle rate	Risk: 0<=IRR<hurdle rate
	Model I	Model II	Model III	Model IV
PUBLIC SHARE	-0.538***	-0.912***	-1.115***	-2.358***
	(0.163)	(0.212)	(0.265)	(0.654)
HIGH-TECH	0.073	0.173*	0.074	0.230
	(0.070)	(0.091)	(0.113)	(0.251)
START-UP	-0.096	0.300***	-0.100	-0.787***
	(0.062)	(0.079)	(0.100)	(0.225)
PATENTS	-0.577***	-0.814***	-0.575***	-0.164
	(0.075)	(0.096)	(0.114)	(0.231)
FUNDSIZE	-0.156***	-0.161***	-0.110*	-0.394***
	(0.040)	(0.050)	(0.060)	(0.124)
SEED FUND	0.103	0.428**	-0.156	-0.697
	(0.140)	(0.166)	(0.255)	(0.669)
INVESTMENT PERIOD	-0.030	-0.560*	-0.218	0.422
	(0.247)	(0.331)	(0.370)	(0.762)
SME STOCK INDEX	0.250**	0.756***	0.397*	-0.062
	(0.127)	(0.165)	(0.208)	(0.442)
Country dummies (fund)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Country dummies (company)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Investment year dummies	No	No	No	No
Observations	2482	2482	2482	2482
Failures	1288	796	511	107
Number of competing events	--	432	717	1121
Censored	1254	1254	1254	1254
LogLik	-2336.4	-5654.1	-3639.984	-743.838

Standard errors in parentheses. Significance levels: * 90%, ** 95%, *** 99%.

6. Conclusions

In this paper, we investigated the impact of public ownership levels on the investment strategies of hybrid VC funds. In particular, the empirical analysis was focused on observing the likelihood of write-offs and the timing of exits. The results suggest that different levels of public ownership are associated with significantly different investment patterns. More specifically, the joint observation of the results from the probit and the duration models suggest that higher public stakes are significantly correlated with a lower incidence of write-offs and a longer duration for the investments, particularly in the case of deals that are characterized by intermediate levels of financial returns.

We argue that this evidence is compatible with the objective function of a public investor, which is not simply restricted to financial returns, as private investors would demand, but also includes additional factors related to the spillover effects of entrepreneurship. From this perspective, our evidence also suggests that there is not necessarily a risk that private capital will be crowded out as a consequence of direct public intervention. It has to be noted that we have deliberately focused the analysis on the funds’ investment strategy rather than on the financial returns generated at the fund level. VC funds that contain a larger public stake appear to have a more risk averse and “patient” investment strategy. We argue that our approach contributes to the extant literature, which, when addressing the impact of public funding, has adopted a standard financial fund-level perspective that could have induced a more negative evaluation of the role of public support to VC. We are aware that the generalization of our findings is not straightforward because our database includes only funds that received public money from a specific institutional subject. However, this paper also provides a theoretically grounded methodology to allow the replication of the analysis on other samples of publicly sponsored VC funds.

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ANNEX A – A simple model of VC exit strategy when resources are limited

In this Annex we propose a simple model for the timing of exit decisions from a VC investment. The key assumption is that the VC fund is resource constrained – that is it can simultaneously manage only a limited number of ventures – and it can choose whether to maintain an intermediate-return investment or to replace it with a new uncertain investment, hopefully offering a superior performance. In order to highlight the effects of limited resources and market conditions on the preference for more or less patient strategies, the model neglects a number of crucial dimensions in the VC financing process, such as the managerial actions of the VC staff in favor of the target firm after the initial investment and different modes of divestment, among others.