Journal of Business Venturing最新文献

We explore the importance of sustaining commitment in inter-firm relationships in the corporate venture capital setting. We find that a corporate investor's past behavior in terms of committing to investment relationships and not abandoning them prematurely confers reputational benefits that increase the likelihood of its participation in future investment opportunities. These reputational effects have a greater impact when the corporate investor has extensive patent stocks and has higher levels of potential slack. Our study highlights the value of sustaining commitment in interfirm relationships, and offers a deeper understanding of an important driver of corporate venture capital program investment opportunities.

We consider the effect of employee stock options on employee mobility and employee entrepreneurship. Employee stock options are firm-specific, long-term, equity-based incentive instruments—attractive properties for affecting employee behaviors and decisions. We argue that employee stock options reduce employee mobility levels. By contrast, we posit that employee stock options increase employee entrepreneurship levels, and even more so when a firm's knowledge scope is narrow. Using the semiconductor industry as the setting, we document not only the negative effect of employee stock options on employee mobility levels but also the positive impact on employee entrepreneurship levels; the positive impact is also more substantial in firms with a narrow knowledge scope. We contribute to the literature that examines the influence of organizational conditions on the origins of entrepreneurship. We also inform research on strategic human capital by explicating the divergent effects of firm-specific incentives on two crucial human capital outcomes for firms.

We examine how parental divorce in early life affects performance in entrepreneurship in adulthood. Drawing on life course theory and empirical analyses of US self-employment and childhood data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we show that entrepreneurs' experience of parental divorce in childhood benefits their entrepreneurial performance in adulthood through a gain in self-efficacy while simultaneously suppressing entrepreneurial performance through a shortfall in human capital. We also show that whether the performance advantages or disadvantages from parental divorce dominate depends on parental human capital. While parental divorce is associated with underperformance for entrepreneurs whose parents have high levels of human capital, it is positively related to entrepreneurial performance for those with low parental human capital. Our study contributes new theory and evidence on the intertemporal relationship between past family contexts and present entrepreneurial performance.

While age is positively related to entrepreneurial success, the prevailing stereotype favors younger entrepreneurs. To better understand how these contradictory perspectives influence funding decisions, we examine the role of age in a sample of 41,602 reward-based crowdfunding campaigns from Indiegogo. We find a negative correlation between an entrepreneur's apparent age and funding performance, indicating a preference for younger entrepreneurs. However, we also find age-based homophily where older entrepreneurs' campaigns attract older backers. Our study distinguishes between statistical and status-based discrimination to understand the multi-faceted nature of age in reward-based crowdfunding and demonstrate how investment motives mitigate and reinforce age-based discrimination.

This study examines the impact of mandatory legal form choices on startups' debt financing opportunities. We posit that an entrepreneur's initial legal form decision serves as a reliable signal to outside lenders, reducing adverse selection concerns. Using data from German startups, we find that limited liability companies with low capital requirements disproportionately secure less debt than their high-capital counterparts. This financing disparity is particularly pronounced for younger firms in areas dominated by small relationship banks, but it diminishes with firm age. Our findings highlight the unintended consequences of recent global deregulation efforts.

Executive summary

Formal debt financing is arguably the most important source of external financing for startups. Despite its importance, many startups find it challenging to secure such financing due to informational opacity: they lack the track record or publicly available evidence needed to prove that they are a sound investment. This raises a pressing question: How can startups credibly convey their creditworthiness to potential lenders?

We posit that a startup entrepreneur's choice of legal form acts as a pivotal signal to potential lenders, allowing them to differentiate between high-risk and low-risk ventures. Every startup must decide what legal form it will adopt at incorporation. Unlike most other, industry-specific decisions, the choice of legal form acts as a consistent and universally applicable signal. Moreover, recent shifts in global regulations have seen the emergence of companies with low-capital legal forms, a development further underscoring the importance of studying these choices (World Bank, 2020).

We theorize that adopting a legal form with high minimum paid-in capital requirements signals that a venture will be less likely to default on a loan: entrepreneurs who anticipate a higher likelihood of default will be less inclined to pick a legal form with high minimum capital requirements since they would be liable for the amount of paid-in capital in the case of bankruptcy. The opportunity costs of such a choice would also be higher as founding a high-capital firm would entail foregoing alternative, safer investment opportunities. Furthermore, the reputational costs and potential stigma of failure associated with defaulting when choosing a high- versus low-capital legal form may induce high-risk types to choose the latter. Importantly, we posit that the legal form choice has signaling value beyond the amount of paid-in capital: among firms with the same amount of equity and similar firm and founder characteristics, those ventures with a low-capital legal form have more difficulty in attracting the necessary external funding.

We utilize comprehensive administrative and survey data from German firms to empirically test our hypotheses. In 2008, Germany introduced the “mini-LLC” or “low-capital LLC,” allowing founders to o