Papers by Samuele Murtinu
International Studies in Entrepreneurship
Academics, pundits, and policymakers have recently called for a stronger governmental role in the... more Academics, pundits, and policymakers have recently called for a stronger governmental role in the economy to tackle social issues such as inequality and grand challenges like global warming. Despite a general recognition among economists and management scholars that government efforts to guide and control innovation or subsidize private entrepreneurs have failed to yield results, these calls also describe an entrepreneurial state in which bureaucrats, not entrepreneurs, direct not only basic research but also applied technological development. Building on the notions of economic competence and ownership competence we argue that even well-intentioned and strongly motivated public actors lack the ability to manage the process of innovation, especially under Knightian uncertainty. As stewards of resources owned by the public, government bureaucrats do not exercise the ultimate responsibility that comes with ownership. Moreover, government ownership of firms and labs and government inte...
Organizational Research Methods, 2021
Inflection points, kinks, and jumps identify places where the relationship between dependent and ... more Inflection points, kinks, and jumps identify places where the relationship between dependent and independent variables switches in some important way. Although these switch points are often mentioned in management research, their presence in the data is either ignored, or postulated ad hoc by testing arbitrarily specified functional forms (e.g., U or inverted U-shaped relationships). This is problematic if we want accurate tests for our theories. To address this issue, we provide an integrative framework for the identification of nonlinearities. Our approach constitutes a precursor step that researchers will want to conduct before deciding which estimation model may be most appropriate. We also provide instructions on how our approach can be implemented, and a replicable illustration of the procedure. Our illustrative example shows how the identification of endogenous switch points may lead to significantly different conclusions compared to those obtained when switch points are igno...
Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 2020
Grounding on the literature on resource dependence, board political capital and principal-princip... more Grounding on the literature on resource dependence, board political capital and principal-principal conflicts, I conceptualize governmental minority shareholding as a governance strategy through which ventures access information about future policy shifts and better calibrate their decisions before policy implementation. I test these arguments on multi-country firm-level longitudinal data about European venture capital (VC)-backed and comparable non-VC-backed companies. By means of a difference-in-differences methodology and exploiting the staggered announcement of tax reforms across countries, I show that public VC-backed companies after a tax reform announcement show higher productivity than non-VC-backed ventures, and this effect lasts four years. After decomposing productivity, the post-announcement effect of public VC backing is mainly due to both an output effect (sales value increase) and an enhanced efficiency in the labor factor.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2018
The main strategic objective of bank-affiliated venture capital funds (BVCs) is to enhance demand... more The main strategic objective of bank-affiliated venture capital funds (BVCs) is to enhance demand of debt capital from portfolio companies. This paper investigates the channels through which banks pursue such a strategy. Using detailed data from seven Western European countries in the period 1991-2010, we show, first, that BVC deals are more likely in larger syndicates led by independent venture capitalists, and in "safe" countries. Second, syndicates involving BVCs strategically select investees with a lower liquidity than matched peers and have a negligible impact on their investees' operational performance. Third, investees do not show an increase in debt exposure, compared to matched non-VC-backed firms, but, instead, show a stable need of cash over time. These findings demonstrate that while BVCs aim to enhance demand of debt capital from investees that need liquidity to invest and grow, they still seek to avoid acerbating the default risk of their investees. Finally, syndicates involving BVCs have a large positive impact on the likelihood of IPOs and acquisition exits.
The objective of the course is to describe the features of the VICO infrastructure (click here fo... more The objective of the course is to describe the features of the VICO infrastructure (click here for further information), highlighting its potential applications to early stage researchers interested in entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial finance, practitioners and policy makers. The course also aims at providing a practical training for the exploitation of the VICO infrastructure.
New technology-based firms in Europe: market penetration, public venture capital and timing of in... more New technology-based firms in Europe: market penetration, public venture capital and timing of investment
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2021
Many works at the crossroads of entrepreneurship and finance have studied corporate venture capit... more Many works at the crossroads of entrepreneurship and finance have studied corporate venture capital (CVC)’s decision-making and performance. We explore a neglected aspect in this literature: the presence of families as dominant owners of CVCs’ parent organizations. Our data reveal that families are a key engine of corporate venturing activities: about one third of CVC deals in the US from 2000 to 2017 originated from family firms. Moreover, we find marked differences in the strategies and outcomes of family and non-family CVCs. Family CVCs syndicate more, join larger syndicates, and invest in ventures closer to the parent in terms of geography and industry - especially when the venture is informationally opaque and when the parent’s CEO is a family member. Family CVCs add more value to their portfolio companies, which exhibit a higher likelihood of successful exit, better post-IPO market performance, and more valuable patents after the IPO. Family CVCs are also better able than non-family CVCs to generate shareholder value for their parent companies. Finally, family CVCs invest more during a financial crisis. Collectively, our findings are consistent with the view that family control entails a mix of risk mitigation and long-term preferences beneficial for venturing activities.
In this Editorial, we begin by sketching out two areas that we believe will prove promising for r... more In this Editorial, we begin by sketching out two areas that we believe will prove promising for researchers in international entrepreneurship in the foreseeable future: (i) asymmetric information leading to adverse selection; and (ii) the adoption of emerging digital technologies, including social media, aimed at reducing asymmetric information, via the development of informational capabilities. We then summarize the articles in the special issue and how they encompass the above areas. We also suggest ways in which some of these articles could be extended to further develop and broaden the above areas, so to solve entrepreneurship-driven research and/or policy questions. In sum, we see a successful path forward for researchers and policy makers in international entrepreneurship over the coming decade via embracing interdisciplinary research to expand and deepen research questions.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2021
Using the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) data from 2006-2017 on 130,000 firms in 130 countri... more Using the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) data from 2006-2017 on 130,000 firms in 130 countries across the globe, we document that women-led firms tend to underperform men-led firms. The main contribution of this work is to shed light on three mechanisms that help explain the underperformance: finance, technology, and labor. First, women-led firms are investing less in fixed assets and obtaining less credit from banks. Second, women-led firms are less likely to use information technology to manage their businesses. Third, women-led firms tend to employ more skilled and educated workers, and are more likely to provide workers with permanent contracts, hence incurring higher labor costs. Interestingly, in our data, women top managers do not perceive themselves facing more business obstacles than their male counterparts do.
Global Strategy Journal, 2019
Tobit models have been used to address several questions in management research. Reviewing existi... more Tobit models have been used to address several questions in management research. Reviewing existing practices and applications, we discuss three challenges: (a) assumptions about the nature of data, (b) apparent interchangeability between censoring and selection bias, and (c) potential violations of key assumptions in the distribution of residuals. Empirically analyzing the relationship between
Academy of Management Proceedings, 2019
Research Policy, 2019
This paper describes LIUM submissions to WMT17 News Translation Task for English↔German, English↔... more This paper describes LIUM submissions to WMT17 News Translation Task for English↔German, English↔Turkish, English→Czech and English→Latvian language pairs. We train BPE-based attentive Neural Machine Translation systems with and without factored outputs using the open source nmtpy framework. Competitive scores were obtained by ensembling various systems and exploiting the availability of target monolingual corpora for back-translation. The impact of back-translation quantity and quality is also analyzed for English→Turkish where our post-deadline submission surpassed the best entry by +1.6 BLEU.
Journal of International Business Studies, 2018
Take-down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing... more Take-down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2016
We model a two-parties electoral game in an environment where voters are imperfectly informed on ... more We model a two-parties electoral game in an environment where voters are imperfectly informed on the administrative ability of each party. In equilibrium, parties try to manipulate voters' beliefs and implement fiscal policies that are looser than the social optimum. The size of this deviation from optimality increases with the incentive of parties to manipulate, the voters' information disadvantage, and the interaction between these two elements. We test our theoretical predictions on a sample of 23 OECD countries over the period 1999-2008. We measure the incentive to manipulate voters' beliefs through the ideological cohesion of the cabinet (i.e. government polarization), and the scope to manipulate such beliefs through the level of voters' economic literacy. We find that polarized governments tend to worsen fiscal balances, and this is more likely in countries where the voters' economic literacy is low. However, such tendency vanishes as literacy increases, suggesting that polarization leads to biased fiscal policies only when there is enough room for manipulation. Our results remain stable after controlling for potentially confounding differences across countries and over time-such as individuals' education attainments, electoral and institutional systems, voter turnout-, several types of falsification tests, time dynamics and unobserved heterogeneity.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2016
We test whether born-to-be-green represents a signal toward potential venture capital (VC) invest... more We test whether born-to-be-green represents a signal toward potential venture capital (VC) investors on a sample of Italian, independent, unlisted, high-tech entrepreneurial firms. We employ several identification strategies by controlling for the major potential signals and the alleged selection bias between green and nongreen entrepreneurs. We exploit firm-level information about the Bactive search for VC financing. lternatively, we exploit the cross-local community variation in the awareness about environmental issues in an instrumental variable setting. Our results show that neither running a business based on green technologies nor positioning a business in a green sector per se are strongly correlated with the likelihood to get VC. Instead, we find that born-to-be-green can be a reliable signal for investors only when entrepreneurs perform activities based on green technologies/products and position their business in a green sector, at the same time. Further, we present three contingencies that moderate the association between green business propositions and the likelihood to get VC, namely the technical/scientific education of the founder(s), the origin of the firm as academic spin-out, and the presence of corporate shareholders into the venture's equity. The paper offers relevant managerial implications.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2016
Several papers in the venture capital (VC) literature have studied the decision criteria put in u... more Several papers in the venture capital (VC) literature have studied the decision criteria put in use by VC investors (VCs) in selecting promising young high-tech entrepreneurial ventures. To the best of our knowledge, there are no studies in the extant literature that study the determinants of VC refusal by entrepreneurs. This issue is extremely relevant because the current public policies favor the development of VC markets/VC supply. However, given that some entrepreneurial ventures refuse VC financial offers, a full understanding of the determinants of such refusal could allow to design more suited VC policies. In this study, we take the perspective of the entrepreneur and perform several analyses. First, we study the determinants of the likelihood to refuse VC through a probit model. Second, by means of a multinomial logit approach, we investigate the motivations behind the decision to refuse a VC offer. Third, by means of a random effects and switching regression model estimation, we estimate the impact of VC refusal on a firm's growth in sales value and total assets. Our work provides important implications for policymakers and entrepreneurs.
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Papers by Samuele Murtinu