Ann‐Kristin Achleitner

Over the past three decades, universities in industrialized countries have become increasingly active as venture capital financiers. Here, we analyze if investments in university-affiliated portfolio companies, in the form of an institutional-personal relation between the university and the founders, are a commercially successful investment proposition. We use a hand-collected data set of 706 university portfolio companies in the United States and the United Kingdom to extend previous case-based evidence that investments in faculty- and student-led start-ups are an elusive promise that rarely pays off commercially.
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Understanding value creation at the transaction level is at the heart of explaining private equity (PE) returns. Taking advantage of a proprietary sample of 2,029 international buyout deals executed between 1984 and 2013 we provide detailed evidence on financial, market and operational value creation drivers. Additionally, we unravel the differences in value creation between regions, industries, transaction sizes and over time, providing limited and general partners with the opportunity to compare their past transactions with those of their respective peer groups.
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An increasingly global venture capital (VC) business raises the question whether foreign VCs’ investments pull economic activity away from domestic economies. Using a large sample of VC-backed European ventures, we analyze whether involvement of foreign VCs influences firms’ and entrepreneurs’ migration patterns. We provide evidence that foreign investors, in particular from the U.S., on average, back much better European ventures and increase the likelihood of foreign exits and emigration of entrepreneurs.
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