On the real effects of private equity investment: evidence from new ...

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1 IntroductionIt is generally accepted that access to credit is an important determinant of …rm entry andgrowth (Rajan and Zingales (1998)). However, banks are often reluctant to …nance smallnew …rms because of high uncertainty, information asymmetry, and agency costs (Beck et al.(2005)). Private equity investors are specialized to overcome these problems through the useof staged …nancing, private contracting, and active monitoring (Hellmann (1998); Gompersand Lerner (1999, 2001a); Kaplan and Stromberg (2001)) and are therefore more likely to…nance early stage and technology companies than banks.In this paper, we investigatethe previously unexplored e¤ect that these private equity investments have on new businesscreation in Europe. This question is highly relevant to policy makers given that they oftenperceive venture capital as an important contributor to the rising leadership of US …rmsin high technology industries (Gompers and Lerner (2001b)). Hoping to rival this success,the European Union stimulates venture capital investment in an attempt to make Europea hotbed for entrepreneurship (Aernoudt (1999); Gilson (2003)). This paper puts the ideathat venture capital fosters new business creation to the test.Our study makes two key contributions to the literature. First, although there is a largebody of empirical literature looking at the e¤ect of …nance on …rm entry, the vast majorityof it has studied the impact of developments in the banking sector on business formation,with mixed results. Petersen and Rajan (1995) show that …nancial liberalization hurts smallyoung companies because creditors in competitive credit markets …nd it more di¢ cult tointernalize the bene…ts of assisting those …rms. However, Black and Strahan (2002) …ndevidence that the rate of incorporation increases as a result of banking deregulation, and ina related paper Cetorelli and Strahan (2006) use a measure of bank deregulation to show howaverage …rm size in an industry decreases with bank competition, arguably due to increasedentry rates. Regarding general credit market development, Aghion et al. (2007) …nd thatdeeper and more developed banking sectors are associated with higher entry of small …rmsin sectors which are more dependent on external …nance. While the e¤ect of banking sectorECBWorking Paper Series No 1078August 20097
development and restructuring on small business formation is certainly important, the e¤ectof private equity investment, especially start-up …nance, is probably equally important andlargely understudied. This paper aims to …ll this gap.The second contribution is that we add to a remarkably limited research on the e¤ectsof private equity on the real economy. Kortum and Lerner (2000) show that venture capitalinvestment in the United States is associated with more innovation as measured by patentcounts and patent citations. Gompers et al. (2005) examine the propensity of publicly traded…rms to create new venture backed …rms. They …nd that younger public …rms located inmain hubs of venture capital activity are the most likely to create new ventures. Tang andChyi (2008) …nd that venture capital investment enhances productivity growth. Regardingnew business formation, we are only aware of one study that examines the impact of venturecapital at the regional level in the U.S. Mollica and Zingales (2007) report that …rm entryand innovation increase in U.S. regions that attract more venture capital. Our paper addsto this literature by providing the …rst comprehensive cross-country study examining thee¤ect of private equity on …rm entry in Europe. Moreover, our European data enables usto distinguish between stages and investor types and does not focus on the e¤ect of venturecapital alone but also includes the e¤ects of later stage private equity, like buyout …nance.There are two main mechanisms suggested by the literature via which private equity ingeneral and venture capital in particular should lead to higher rates of business incorporation.First, nascent entrepreneurs may recognize the need for capital in the future andonly establish …rms when they have reasonably high expectations of obtaining such funding.This implies that not just start-up …nance, but later …nancing stages, like expansion …nance,should matter too for …rm entry. Second, …rms may be engaged in "entrepreneurial spawning",that is, the propensity of former employees of publicly traded …rms to start their owncompanies. There are several competing explanations for that. Christensen (1997) has arguedthat large, established …rms are incapable of adopting radical new technologies becauseit would disrupt their established way of organizing business. It is also possible that these…rms cannot evaluate new disruptive technologies as they fall outside of their line of business8ECBWorking Paper Series No 1078August 2009
Page 1 and 2: Working Paper SeriesNo 1078 / augus
Page 3 and 4: © European Central Bank, 2009Addre
Page 5 and 6: AbstractUsing a comprehensive datab
Page 7: environment leaves the main results
Page 11 and 12: to industries which are more R&D in
Page 13 and 14: of destination.We …rst recalculat
Page 15 and 16: 2.3 US industry-level entry dataAs
Page 17 and 18: tend to be heavily regulated and/or
Page 19 and 20: speci…c e¤ects. Critically, we a
Page 21 and 22: …rms only (less than 10 employees
Page 23 and 24: higher for industries with higher e
Page 25 and 26: percentage of the adult population
Page 27 and 28: cost of …nancing to venture capit
Page 29 and 30: 4.6 RobustnessWe conduct an extensi
Page 31 and 32: is the same as the gap between priv
Page 33 and 34: This paper is, to our knowledge, th
Page 35 and 36: [12] Cetorelli, N., and P.E. Straha
Page 37 and 38: [35] Petersen, M., and R. Rajan, 19
Page 39 and 40: Table 2Summary statistics on entry,
Page 41 and 42: Table 42-digit NACE rev. 1.1 indust
Page 43 and 44: Table 6Private equity timing and fi
Page 45 and 46: Table 8Private equity and alternati
Page 47 and 48: Appendix 1. Variables: definitions
Page 49 and 50: Share shadow economyShare of the in
Page 51: 1068 “Asset price misalignments a

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