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New businesses face constraints in the form of limited access to capital and managerial expertise. Many governments have developed public venture capital programs for the purpose of easing these constraints and assisting young firms in generating growth in output and employment. The paper develops a model that incorporates occupational choice and informational asymmetries with regard to the ability of entrepreneurs and supply of effort, and determines the optimal supply of entrepreneurship, financial assistance, and managerial advice provided by a public venture capital program.

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The authors develop a search model of venture capital in which the number of successful matches of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists (VCs) at any moment in time is a function of the number of entrepreneurs searching for funds, the number of VCs searching for entrepreneurs, and the number of vacancies posted by each VC. The authors extend the literature by incorporating search unemployment and they explicitly model the occupational choice of individuals to become workers or entrepreneurs. Their analysis shows that, in the market equilibrium, the level of advice VCs offer is inefficiently low compared with the social optimum. Furthermore, the number of vacancies, the level of employment, and the number of potential entrepreneurs are generally either too low or too high relative to their socially optimal level. Policy to achieve the social optimum consists of a capital gains subsidy, an employment tax or subsidy, and an investment tax or subsidy.