Francesco Bollazzi

The internationalization of the portfolio company is a key strategy used by private equity (PE) investors to create value and produce returns. In recent years, the focus on the strategies for value-creation through operational improvement has become essential to achieve the exponential growth required to the portfolio company, given the low multiples and the market risk of leverage. In this paper, we define the key types of contribution that a PE investor can provide in order to support the internationalization process and their effects on the portfolio company’s performance. The research is based on a survey administered to 47 PE fund managers, which covers 156 deals involving Italian companies. The results offer insight into the contribution to the corporate governance, strategy and management that PE provides in addition to the monetary support. The findings show that the non-financial support given to the portfolio companies has a positive impact on the performance and that the most impactful contribution the PE can give is the support to the relational network when the company strategy involves a foreign direct investment.

The aim of this study is to show how information asymmetry affects the venture capital (VC) deal selection process in the Italian capital market. In this paper, the authors want to analyse how venture capitalists (VCs) choose which new companies to sustain. In the absence of information about these start-ups, investors encounter difficulties when evaluating the quality of new firms. VCs can only assess the value of observable characteristics, relying on a background affected by information asymmetries, such as the entrepreneur and the management team, patents, and the presence of strategic alliances. The authors use information collected in a dataset built on information contained in the Bureau van Dijk database, completed with data collected through a survey sent to VC funds. The period under observation is between 2012 and 2017. The dataset is composed of 150 observations, and represents a significant sample of the Italian market. The results show that there is a positive relationship between management education, the management team's international experience, number of patents and the likelihood of receiving financing from VCs. This reasoning allows for highlighting the importance of matching the business idea with the investment decision made between VCs and new enterprises, especially when the better-informed part, the firms, can send a signal of quality to the less-informed part, the VCs.

This research paper investigates the role of Italian venture capital in supporting innovative start-ups in their early-stage process, which is usually focused on the creation of a new product or the development of a new service. The aim of the study is to observe and assess the key economic features of innovative start-ups funded at the beginning of the early-stage by venture capital funds and thereafter analyze the level of development of target companies at four years since the capital injection. The sample of deals created to describe this dynamic process is composed by investments realized between 1996 and 2012 and, in this way, according to the chosen methodology, it is representative of Italian venture capital role and contribution in the years from 1996 to 2016. The authors used for their empirical study a proprietary database, Venture Capital Monitor—VeMTM. Through the analysis of collected data, the paper describes the strategic importance of venture capital investments in early-stage opportunities both for target companies and the Italian socio-economic environment, and finds aggregate values of reference to quantitatively define the socio-economic outcome of this kind of operations. A final further contribution is provided by comparing the present results to the ones of two previous studies conducted by the authors.

The purpose of this paper is to test the importance of the Corporate Social Responsibility factor on the ROA in a sample of newly listed companies on the Italian Stock Exchange. The study analyzes 84 IPOs listed at the Borsa Italiana in the period between 2009 and 2015. The authors want to test if there is an advantage in terms of better return on assets when companies consider the drafting of a sustainability report, the presence of environmental responsibility, the management of supplier relationships, the information transparency and fairness, versus those companies which are not seen as responsible in these areas. The authors want to test the relationship between ROA and ESG Corporate Responsibility factors using a unpaired t-tests. The statistical analysis shows that not all factors contribute to the improvement of performance in the newly listed companies, but it seems to have a greater ROA only the companies that take on responsibilities from an environmental perspective.

The aim of this paper is to study the importance of the CSR on the performance of newly listed company at the Italian Stock Exchange with a focus on the impact of environmental, social and government responsibility, studying the performance of the first day of listing. The authors want to test if there is an advantage in terms of lower underpricing related to the preparation of a sustainability report, a document that allows reducing the information asymmetry or if, contrarily, the factors related to ESG Corporate Responsibility are not considered, by the layers of the listing process, under the offer price definition, but they are otherwise valued by the market, with the consequence of a higher underpricing for IPOs of the virtuous companies. The paper presents an empirical analysis on a sample of 84 IPOs admitted to Italian Stock Exchange between 2009 and 2015, in order to study the impact of ESG Corporate Responsibility on underpricing, analyzing the performance of the new companies listed. Through the univariate and multivariate analysis, the authors propose to show any relationship between performance and ESG corporate responsibility strategies.

This paper analyzes the importance of creating ideal conditions in order to develop venture capital in Italy. The authors demonstrate the importance this activity plays in the development of new ventures and, through an experimental model, they present the most important determinants or drivers leading to an expansion of the venture capital market. Support provided in the form of investments in target companies can - from a macroeconomic point of view - be interpreted as an opportunity for up and coming market players to develop into market champions and to consolidate that position for themselves in a way that would never have otherwise been possible.