The Effects of Venture Capitalists on the Governance of Firms

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Research Question/Issue: What determines venture capitalists influence on the governance of firms? How do venture capitalists shape the governance of their investees? Are venture capitalists governance practices consistent across countries? These important questions are under-investigated in the extant literature. In this study, we shed light on the effects of venture capital investors on a large set of governance decisions and we discover the existence of striking cross-country differences. Research Findings/Insights: We test our conjectures on a unique hand-collected questionnaire-based dataset of 164 companies in five countries and two regions (Europe and the US). Our empirical results show that there is a strong and positive relationship between VCs' funding and their influence on some factors like decisions on CEO hiring, executive compensation, board decisions and appointments. Employee incentives are also positively related to the proportion of VC funding. On the other hand, results show that the proportion of VC funding is only marginally significant in explaining VC influence on strategy direction and investment planning. Our analysis though, offers a remarkably different view after splitting data into European and American subsamples. Theoretical/Academic Implications: Our results provide a novel view of the functioning of the Venture Capital industry and its degree of pervasiveness in the management of portfolio companies. Adopting a unique dataset, we add new evidence on detailed governance decisions, thus supporting the idea that the incremental contribution of a professional investor to a new venture is largely exceeding the capital infusion only. Finally, we show that governance decisions exhibit significant country effects. This evidence supports the view that a global theory of corporate governance cannot rely on a single interpretation framework such as agency theory, but needs to be integrated with predictions from alternative views such institutional theory. Practitioner/Policy Implications: Corporate governance is the essential mechanism allowing proper management of financial and corporate resources by aligning incentives of employees and investors, thus enabling oversight and control on companies. Yet, corporate governance rules and mechanisms are costly and have different effectiveness across countries. Our results provide guidance to investors in selecting the appropriate set of governance provisions conditional on a set of investment-specific factors.