Given the sizeable amount of public investments in venture capital (VC) in many countries, an emerging empirical literature investigates the impact of government venture funds on firm performance. We reassess the key findings of this literature using a new database on innovative start-ups and VC investments, which is unprecedented for granularity and comprehensiveness and covers a longer, more recent time period. Our analysis confirms the established finding that start-ups backed by government VC underperform start-ups backed by private investors. Differently from the extant literature, instead, we do not find that mixed public–private investments in the first stage are associated with additional private investments in later funding rounds. We interpret this as evidence that public VC is bounded to fail without an ongoing commitment throughout the process of development and growth of new ventures.

中文翻译：

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由公共风险投资资助的初创企业有什么不同吗？来自微观数据的新的跨国证据

鉴于许多国家对风险资本 (VC) 的大量公共投资，新兴的实证文献调查了政府风险基金对公司业绩的影响。我们使用关于创新初创企业和风险投资的新数据库重新评估了该文献的主要发现，该数据库在粒度和全面性方面是前所未有的，并且涵盖了更长、更近的时间段。我们的分析证实了既定的发现，即由政府风险投资支持的初创企业表现逊于由私人投资者支持的初创企业。相反，与现有文献不同的是，我们没有发现第一阶段的混合公私投资与后期融资中的额外私人投资有关。