Explore the vast range of titles available.

We study the investment patterns of different types of venture capital (VC) investors in Europe: independent VC, corporate VC, bank-affiliated VC and governmental VC. We rely on a unique dataset that covers 1663 first VC investments made by 846 investors in 737 young high-tech entrepreneurial ventures in seven European countries. We compare the relative specialization indices of the different VC investor types across several dimensions that characterize investee companies: industry, age, size, stage of development, distance from the investor and country. Our findings indicate that VC investor types in Europe differ substantially in their investment patterns when compared to one another and that, in terms of investment patterns, governmental VC investors appear to be the most distinct type of VC investor. The investment patterns of different VC investors are stable over time and similar across different European countries. Finally, the investment patterns of the different VC investor types in Europe are significantly different from those observed in the USA.

This contribution discusses the nuances of vulnerability that emerge from the relationship with the territory of secondary school students in a rural area of Sardinia. The article confronts the most updated definitions of vulnerability with current debates on youth, transitions to work and transitions to adulthood scholarship. Part of a wider project on the PCTO (still called in the narratives of the students with the old name of ‘alternance’), it deconstructs dimensions of vulnerability offering a glimpse on the difficulties that it entails in the specific case of a territory with a strong vocation for agriculture and viniculture, where traditional models keep their centrality in socialization processes. In discussing the empirical material, we go in depth into three students’ narratives.

The liberalisation of temporary contracts has led to a sizeable share of jobs covered by temporary contracts. This article proposes a matching model of unemployment in which temporary (fixed-term) and permanent (open-ended) jobs coexist in a long-run equilibrium. From the labour demand standpoint, the choice of the type of contract leads to a trade-off between an ex-ante speed of hiring and an ex-post flexible dismissal rate. Empirically, we test with Italian longitudinal data whether nonemployment spells that lead to a temporary job are shorter on average. The empirical evidence strongly supports our theoretical prediction.

Building on an organisational learning perspective, we argue that emerging market firms' international experience and home-country characteristics are core sources of learning. Furthermore, we argue that these factors constitute important determinants of emerging market firms' acquisition behaviour in developed countries (south-north acquisitions). We test our hypotheses on a sample of 808 south-north acquisitions. The acquisitions were undertaken in Europe, Japan and North America (Canada and the US) between 1999 and 2008 by firms from the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China. As suggested by the internationalisation process model, our results show that emerging market firms undertake acquisitions in developed countries in an incremental fashion. Acquisition experience in developed markets increases the likelihood of exploitative expansion, while acquisition experience in developing markets does not appear to have any effect. The results also show that a lack of market and knowledge-based resources at home curbs explorative acquisitions by firms in emerging markets.

Independent venture capital (IVC) investors have more powerful incentives than corporate venture capital (CVC) investors to take actions that signal their capabilities (i.e. to \"grandstand\"). We argue that this should engender differences in the treatment effect of IVC and CVC on the mode of growth of portfolio companies. Short-term sales growth of IVC-backed firms in the period that immediately follows the VC investment should outpace that of CVC-backed firms, while we expect no difference in employment growth. We find support for these theoretical predictions on a sample of 531 Italian new technology-based firms, using several panel estimators to control for endogeneity of IVC and CVC.

We propose a formal model that analyzes which entrepreneurial ventures actively seek and subsequently obtain venture capital (VC) financing in thin VC markets. The model shows that in thin VC markets, (1) VC investors will invest in companies in need (frog-kissing) rather than in best performers (cherry-picking), and (2) the best performing ventures will self-select out of the market for VC. These conclusions are in line with the results from the literature, which note that in Europe many entrepreneurial firms do not actively seek VC investment and that VC investors do not appear to possess the same cherry-picking ability that they have in the US.

This contribution discusses the nuances of vulnerability that emerge from the relationship with the territory of secondary school students in a rural area of Sardinia. The article confronts the most updated definitions of vulnerability with current debates on youth, transitions to work and transitions to adulthood scholarship. Part of a wider project on the PCTO (still called in the narratives of the students with the old name of 'alternance'), it deconstructs dimensions of vulnerability offering a glimpse on the difficulties that it entails in the specific case of a territory with a strong vocation for agriculture and viniculture, where traditional models keep their centrality in socialization processes. In discussing the empirical material, we go in depth into three students' narratives.

The aim of this work is to investigate the drivers of productivity evolution in the European life insurance industry in the aftermath of the enforcement of the Third Directive. We apply Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to a panel of 602 life insurance companies operating in five European countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the U.K.) between 1997 and 2004 and develop a generalized Malmquist efficiency decomposition to gauge the relative importance of two sources of productivity change: the improvement of best-practices via innovation, and the adoption of practices currently adopted by local or foreign best-in-class insurers. We find that productivity increased on an annual basis by 6.71 per cent; the increase has been mostly due to innovation in best-practices (6.67 per cent), while best-practice adoption contributed by a mere 0.04 per cent. Our findings also indicate that, over the period of our analysis, innovation of best-practices was attributable to technological change. We find no evidence, instead, that productivity has been driven by a shift in the risk profile of insurers.

Venture capital (VC) and private equity (PE) investors play different roles in their portfolio companies. We argue that this will translate in a recognizable difference in the investment sensitivity to cash flows of portfolio companies and its evolution after the first investment round. We hypothesise that VC, thanks to its ability in overcoming asymmetries in information, will entail a reduction in the financial constraints which hampered the growth of investee firms. We predict, instead, a greater dependency of investments to cash flow for PE-backed companies, driven by the renewed interest for growth of their management combined with higher leverage. We find evidence confirming our hypotheses on a large panel of Spanish unlisted firms in low and medium technology sectors, where both VC and PE firms are active.