Corporate venture capital (CVC) units play a crucial role in corporate innovation, yet their investment activity varies widely. Some pursue numerous deals each year, while others invest only occasionally. What factors drive these differences? This study investigates Central European CVC units, analyzing how their objectives, structural configurations, and parent company characteristics influence investment activity and how they compare to US-based CVCs. Based on semi-structured interviews with investment professionals from 60 CVC units, we find that financially driven CVCs and those backed by larger parent companies exhibit higher investment activity, whereas strategic CVCs adopt a more selective investment approach. At the same time, we find no significant evidence that structural autonomy leads to increased investment activity, nor that greater oversight or bureaucracy in larger parent companies reduces investment rates per team member. These results contribute to a deeper understanding of how CVC structures shape investment activity and provide a foundation for future research on optimizing CVC structures for improved financial and strategic performance.

In contrast to the classical financial markets, where green investments often exhibit excess returns or issue discounts, the green premium in venture capital is more pronounced in terms of "quantitative" characteristics. Employing a comprehensive dataset of 79,120 financing events across 36,570 Chinese enterprises from the Qingke database from 1998 to 2017, empirical results show that compared to non-green industries, single-round venture capital investments in green industries are approximately 10% lower. However, green industry enterprises receive an additional 0.8 financing rounds on average. Consequently, the total venture capital invested in green industry firms ultimately exceeds that of non-green firms by around 10%. This suggests that while each round of investment in green industries may be smaller with notable heterogeneity in development stage and investment rounds, the cumulative effect of multiple rounds results in higher overall funding for these enterprises.

This paper investigates the investments of Business Angels (BAs) made through equity crowdfunding (ECF) platforms. Using a dataset of 242 successful crowdfunding campaigns launched by Italian ventures between 2015 and 2020, we identify the effect of individual BAs, defined as former entrepreneurs that successfully exited their companies with proceedings to reinvest, and BAs affiliated to BA networks or groups on the post-campaign performances of ECF ventures. We find that companies invested by BAs during their first ECF campaign are more likely to realize a second external equity round compared to companies invested by regular crowd investors only. This positive effect is mainly driven by active BAs, i.e. BAs that participate in shareholders’ meetings in the post campaign phase. Results remain robust when using instrumental variables (IVs) to account for the likelihood of BA participation in ECF. Tax shocks affecting BA investments in startups serves as the IVs in this analysis.

We disentangle the contributions of board of directors characteristics and firm characteristics to explain firm productivity. Our analysis is focused on firms from UK that have venture capital or private equity funding. We show that the most important variables are the diversity of nationalities on the board of directors and the total equity available to shareholders. The diversity of gender is also an important variable but the diversity of occupations is less important, particularly with respect to productivity. We also present evidence that increasing the number of female directors is also associated with higher profits after tax. Likewise, firms with longer history tend to have a lower diversity of gender score and hence more females in their boardroom. Much younger companies go the opposite. Our inference is extracted from the data using graphical models that utilise the igraph as the main vehicle for modelling.