Diego Useche

This paper examines the role of internal social capital on the composition of the crowd of backers attracted by US-born vis a vis immigrant entrepreneurs. Our estimates are based on an original dataset of 2,231 Kickstarter campaigns and show that immigrant entrepreneurs attract comparatively fewer backers located in the host country but receive more contributions from backers located in other countries. Overall, this allows immigrant entrepreneurs to achieve a fundraising performance similar to that of local-born entrepreneurs. We show that entrepreneurs’ social capital developed within the reward-based crowdfunding platform positively moderates the previous relationships.  

In this paper, we study how the support of heterogeneous venture capital firms (VCs), that is: independent venture capital firms (IVCs), bank-affiliated venture capital firms (BVCs) and corporate venture capital firms (CVCs), shapes the delisting route of companies through business failure and merger & acquisitions (M&As), while distinguishing between European M&As and extra-EU M&As after the Initial Public Offering (IPO). We find that the influence of the VCs in the firms’ post-IPO delisting varies according to the mode of delisting and the type of venture capitalist. In particular, we find that the presence of leading IVC and BVC investments before IPO is related to a lower likelihood of exiting the stock market through business failure but does not significantly affect the likelihood of M&As. In contrast, the presence of CVC investors is related to a higher likelihood of delisting through extra-EU M&As. 

Based on a relational view of international business, we investigate the role of migrant inventors in cross-border mergers and acquisitions undertaken by R&D-active firms. We hypothesize that the migrant inventors’ international social networks can be leveraged by their employers in order to identify and/or integrate relevant knowledge bases of acquisition targets in the inventors’ home country. We nuance our hypothesis by means of several conditional logistic regressions on a large matched sample of deals and control cases. The impact of migrant inventors increases with the distance between countries and for targets located in countries with weak administrative/legal systems, as well as when targets are either innovative or belong to high-tech sectors or to the same sector as the acquirer, and for full versus partial acquisitions.

Orphan Drug (OD) legislation has been implemented with regulatory and financial incentives to encourage the drug innovation to treat rare diseases. This study aims to test whether OD Designations (ODD) granted by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to pharmaceuticals and biotechnology start-up companies may be considered as relevant signals in, attracting entrepreneurial finance and increasing the amount invested at the time of the Initial Public Offering (IPO) in the US stock markets. We found that the signaling power of ODD is positively and statistically significant for IPO investors in stock markets. Regression results also suggest that ODD are stronger than patents applications to attract IPO investors. Scholar and policy implications are discussed in the light of the signaling theory and drug development policies 

We test whether patenting activity impacts on software companies’ likelihood of survival after going public in the UK, Germany, France, Sweden, Italy and Spain. Our database covers all software companies undertaking IPOs in these six countries between 1 January 1997 and 31 December 2005, and includes data from various sources (the Bureau van Dijk Zephyr database, the Questel-Orbit QPAT patent database, financial documents available on the company websites and specialised websites). Survival analysis follows a semi-parametric approach, based on the stratified Cox competing risk model, controlling for other determinants of survival. We find that, after controlling for the firms’ main entry characteristics (experience, size, sales, profitability and solvency, together with market conditions), the influence of the size and the quality of the firms’ patent portfolios is different according to the type of exit and the type of software firm. In particular, the number of patents reduces the risk of failure and acquisition for software developers, while quality increases their attractiveness as an acquisition target.