This paper asks whether rating agencies played a passive role or were an active driving force during Europe's sovereign debt crisis. We address this by estimating relationships between sovereign debt ratings and macroeconomic and structural variables. We then use these equ-ations to decompose...

Competence behind the rating of sovereign countries is crucial, given that the market for government bonds may be vulnerable to multiple equilibria and self-fulfilling prophecies. With this in mind, this paper reviews and scrutinizes an official Standard and Poor’s (S&P) publication that...

We explore whether experiences during Europe's sovereign debt crisis support the notion that governments faced scenarios of self-fulfilling prophecy and multiple equilibria. To this end, we provide estimates of the effect of interest rates and other macroeconomic variables on sovereign debt...

This paper discusses the role of public policy towards the venture capital industry. The model emphasizes four margins: supply of entrepreneurs due to career choice, entry of venture capital funds and search for investment opportunities, simultaneous entrepre-neurial effort and managerial advice...

This paper proposes and analyses a model of start-up investment. Innovative entrepreneurs are commercially inexperienced and can benefit from venture capital support. Only part of them succeed in matching with a venture capitalist while the rest must resort to standard bank finance. We consider...

Venture capitalists, representing informed capital, screen, monitor and advise start-up entrepreneurs. The paper reports three new results on venture capital (VC) finance. First, there is an optimal number of companies in the VC portfolio with a trade-off between the number of companies and the...

In recent years, venture capital has increasingly become a factor in the financing of new firms. We examine how the value of mature firms determines the incentives of entrepreneurs to start up new firms and of venture capitalists to finance and advise them. We examine how capital gains taxes as...

A model of start-up finance with double moral hazard is proposed. Entrepreneurs have ideas but lack own resources as well as commercial experience. Venture capitalists provide start-up finance and managerial support. Both types of agents thus jointly contribute to the firm's success, but neither...

In financing start-up firms, venture capitalists carefully select among alternative projects, design incentive compatible financial contracts and support portfolio companies with value enhancing managerial advice. This paper considers how venture capitalists can induce self-selection among...

Venture capital has become an important source of financing young entrepreneurial firms. Venture capital backed firms are often perceived as more innovative and as creating more value than others. Perhaps for this reason, policy makers are keen to create a good institutional framework to...