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Law

Maurer School of Law: Indiana University

Venture capital

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Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Business

Carrots And Sticks: How Vcs Induce Entrepreneurial Teams To Sell Startups, Brian J. Broughman, Jesse M. Fried Jan 2013

Carrots And Sticks: How Vcs Induce Entrepreneurial Teams To Sell Startups, Brian J. Broughman, Jesse M. Fried

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Venture capitalists (VCs) usually exit their investments in a startup via a trade sale. But the entrepreneurial team – the startup’s founder, other executives, and common shareholders – may resist a trade sale. Such resistance is likely to be particularly intense when the sale price is low relative to VCs’ liquidation preferences. Using a hand-collected dataset of Silicon Valley firms, we investigate how VCs overcome such resistance. We find, in our sample, that VCs give bribes (carrots) to the entrepreneurial team in 45% of trade sales; in these sales, carrots total an average of 9% of deal value. The overt …


Independent Directors And Shared Board Control In Venture Finance, Brian J. Broughman Jan 2013

Independent Directors And Shared Board Control In Venture Finance, Brian J. Broughman

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In most VC-backed firms neither the entrepreneurs nor the VC investors control the board. Instead control is typically shared with a mutually appointed independent director holding the tie-breaking seat. Contract theory, which treats control as an indivisible right held by one party, does not have a good explanation for this practice. Using a bargaining game similar to final offer arbitration, I show that an independent director as tie-breaker can reduce holdup by moderating each party’s ex post threat position, potentially expanding the range of firms which receive external financing. This project contributes to the literature on incomplete contracting and holdup, …


The Ifc's New Africa, Latin America, And Caribbean Fund: Its Worrisome Start, And How To Fix It, Christiana Ochoa, Patrick J. Keenan Jan 2010

The Ifc's New Africa, Latin America, And Caribbean Fund: Its Worrisome Start, And How To Fix It, Christiana Ochoa, Patrick J. Keenan

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In April 2010 the International Finance Corporation announced the creation of the African, Latin American, and Caribbean fund, a new co-investment vehicle funded largely with commitments from sovereign wealth and pension funds. The fund's objective was to draw on the IFC and the World Bank's strengths in emerging markets to identify and support enterprises that might not otherwise have come to the attention of large investors and thereby help strengthen the private sector and alleviate poverty in some of the world's poorest countries. Unfortunately the fund has, so far, proven a disappointment. It has invested only in large corporations that …