Sources of Funds and Investment Strategies of Venture Capital Funds: Evidence from Germany, Israel, Japan and the UK

Colin Mayer, Koen Schoors and Yishay Yafeh

No 2001-FE-15, Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics

Abstract: Using a newly constructed data set, we compare sources of funds and investment strategies of venture capital (VC) funds in Germany, Israel, Japan and the UK. Sources of VC funds differ significantly across countries, e.g. banks are particularly important in Germany, corporations in Israel, insurance companies in Japan, and pension funds in the UK. VC investment patterns also differ across countries in terms of the stage and sector of financed companies, as well as in the geographical focus of investments, and these differences are significantly related to the variations in funding sources. However, the influence of particular classes of institutions differs across countries. For example, bank backed VC firms in Germany and Japan are as involved in early stage finance as other funds in these countries, whereas in Israel and the UK they tend to invest in relatively late stage finance. While these financial institutional factors account for some of the differences in investment patterns across countries, other considerations (such as supply of entrepreneurs) are of greater significance.

Keywords: Venture capital; financial institutions; sources of funds (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G20 O32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001-07-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:640697a4-d779-425d-99ec-b6bda88e27c5 (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Sources of Funds and Investment Strategies of Venture Capital Funds: Evidence from Germany, Israel, Japan and the UK (2001)
Working Paper: Sources of Funds and Investment Strategies of Venture Capital Funds: Evidence from Germany, Israel, Japan and the UK (2001)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oxf:wpaper:2001-fe-15

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anne Pouliquen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).