Fabio Bertoni

Digitization creates new financial channels that complement traditional intermediaries, but may raise concerns over fraud, cybersecurity, or bubbles. Artificial intelligence and machine learning change the way in which traditional investors work. This special issue focuses on economic, cultural, and regulatory determinants of fintech development, and on the new forms of information production and processing engendered by digital entrepreneurial finance. We provide a general overview of digitization in the market for entrepreneurial finance, illustrate how the different articles in the special issue contribute to advance our knowledge, and identify promising avenues for research.

We study leveraged buyouts (LBOs) to understand how actual and potential organizational slack affect exploitative and exploratory innovation expenditures. LBO companies are characterized by limited actual and high potential organizational slack and, based on theories of organizational search, we predict that both exploitative and explorative innovation expenditures be higher in LBO companies than in non-LBOs. These differences also depend on the technology intensity of the sector in which the target firm operates. The empirical analysis of 882 LBO companies in the UK community innovation survey broadly supports this argument.

This chapter documents the use of debt capital by sovereign wealth funds (SWFs)—a growing and under-researched phenomenon. Three reasons are given for this. First: debt can help SWFs reach their target portfolio size. (Some do not receive regular inflows from their governments to increase their assets under management (AUM). Second: the development of capital markets is a key objective for most of the countries that have created an SWF, and debt may be especially useful for the development of the bond market. SWF bonds are quasi-governmental securities that can be used as collateral and create a reference yield curve. Third: the use of debt capital is particularly appropriate for portfolio SWFs investing in concentrated portfolios of selected companies for strategic and financial reasons. SWFs are more likely to use debt when they are non-commodity-based, come from countries with relatively less developed bond markets, and have a strategic investment style.

We use the theory of organizational ecology to study how governmental venture capital (GVC) affects the investment behavior of private venture capital (PVC). Because of its objectives and dominant competencies, GVC is a unique organizational species that occupies a different niche than PVC. GVC is conceived to establish mutualistic relations with PVC. Accordingly, the greater the presence of GVC in a venture capital (VC) ecosystem, the more PVC investors should be attracted toward GVC’s niche. We consider several relevant niche dimensions at the company (age and size), industry (biotechnology), and regional (competitiveness) levels. Our analysis of 1,239 PVC investments in Europe confirms most of our predictions.