No abstract

The article examines the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT), innovation, and formal and informal institutions on venture capital (VC) investment. The analysis is based on 28-year data spanning 1990-2017 from 19 European and 13 Asia-Pacific countries using generalized two-stage least square instrumental variable technique. After controlling for endogeneity, the results show that ICT, innovation, and informal institutions hold a strong impact on VC investment. ICT and innovation exert a positive and significant influence on VC investment whereas formal institutions exert a positive yet insignificant effect on VC investment. Among the informal institutions, power distance and individualism exert significant and positive influence whereas uncertainty avoidance has significant and negative influence on VC investment. The interaction analysis demonstrates that the association between ICT and VC is strong when institutional quality is high. Moreover, the impact of innovation on VC is pronounced in highly digitized and highly uncertainty-tolerant environments. Explanation of VC capital investment also vary with geography as the effects of trend, ICT and uncertainty avoidance on VC investment are noticeable in the Asia-Pacific region whereas power distance is prominent in the European region. The article makes important contributions to the literature of VC by revealing novel interactions between formal and informal institutions, ICT and innovation depicted in a conceptual model. The study also brings in important highlights to the policy debate on VC development by showing how exactly VC investments are tangled with the different dimensions of institutional and technological environment.