Angel investors around the world

Abstract

We document that the choice between disintermediated individual angel investments and intermediated private equity and venture capital investments depends on legal, economic, and cultural differences. We find evidence of this using PitchBook’s comprehensive data on more than 5000 angel and 80,000 private equity and venture capital investments in 96 countries from 1977 to 2012. The data further indicate that investee firms funded by angels are less likely to successfully exit through either an IPO or an acquisition. These findings are robust to propensity score-matching methods, as well as to clustering standard errors, and excluding U.S. observations, among other approaches.