Essays on International Venture Capital

Venture Capital firms (VCs), compared with other sources of financing, are known to be a value-adding source of finance for high-growth entrepreneurial firms. Venture capital has transitioned from a local to an international subject in recent years. In this thesis , I address three important aspects of the international venture capital research area. In the first essay, I answer these questions: do venture capital firms decide to invest in a cross-border company based solely on their own international experience, or do they also decide based on other venture capital firms’ behaviour in investing in that country? I address these questions by investigating vicarious and experiential learning in the venture capital context, focusing on US cross-border venture capital investment data from 2000 to 2013. The analysis indicates that, on average, venture capital firms use both experiential and vicarious learning strategies in making their cross-border investment decisions. Moreover, the effect of experiential learning is greater than that of vicarious learning, and a venture capital firm’s size moderates this effect. In the second essay, I answer this question: do government venture capital funds crowd-in or crowd-out international private venture capital investment? The crowding-in effect arises when international private venture capital benefits from government subsidies through the enhancement of an entrepreneurial ecosystem and investment syndication. The crowding-out effect arises when government venture capital competes with private venture capital, bidding up deal prices and lowering returns, thereby spurring local private venture capitalists to invest internationally. I examine data from 26 countries from 1998 to 2013. The analysis indicates that, on average, more mixed-structured government venture capital investments than pure-structured government investments in a country crowds-in domestic and foreign private venture capitalists internationally. Moreover, the effect of both structures is greater on domestic private venture capitalists than on foreign ones. In the third essay, I investigate whether government venture capital practices in Canada promote a robust entrepreneurial ecosystem, by analyzing the effect of these practices on domestic and cross-border venture capital investments by private venture capital firms separately. I research the following two questions in parallel: a) Does Canadian government venture capital investment attract private ve