Can Venture Capital Guidance Funds Play the Guiding Role? A Panel Data Analysis Based on the Perspective of Enterprise Financing

Abstract

The innovation and development of the real economy is the key to the current Chinese economic transformation and upgrading, whose development entails the financial support. Venture capital guidance funds（GVCs）provide the main approach for the government to support the development of start-ups financially. However, due to the low liquidity and the information asymmetry, the reality is that the degree of capital participation in venture capital market is seriously insufficient. To expand the pool of capital and fully exploit venture capital funds（VCs）in the process of economic development and industrial promotion, the relevant departments have issued a series of policies and guidance since 2006, which support and encourage the local government to set up GVCs. According to the data compiled by the research institute of Touzhong company, China had set up 1311 GVCs by the end of June 2019, with the amount of approximately 1.97 trillion yuan. The central question that we analyze is whether such large-scale of financial investment has obtained the corresponding goal, namely, the expansion of the aggregate pool of private capital.This paper, considering the limitation of macro-perspective, examines the guiding effect of GVCs on the micro-level. More specifically, we summarize the micro-mechanism concerning the guiding effect of GVCs, and conclude that GVCs can amplify their guiding effect by influencing both the current and subsequent round financing of the invested enterprise. Consequently, we analyze whether GVCs can guide private VCs by investigating whose accumulative changes in the participation in the start-ups’ current and following rounds of financing after invested by GVCs. Besides, this paper further analyzes the differences between the state-owned and non-state-owned management agencies in the selection of investment projects, and empirically examines the heterogeneous impact of different ownership on GVCs’ guiding effect, which is of important practical significance.The results show that:（1）GVCs do play a guiding role not only in the particular financing round in which GVCs are involved, but also the follow-on rounds.（2）The guiding effect depends on the space of time between the enterprise’s follow-on financing rounds and the first time GVCs participate in.（3）The guiding effect of GVCs under the management of private institutions on private VCs is much more intensive compared with those managed by the state-owned institutions.The contributions of this paper are that:（1）The research verifies the guiding role of GVCs from the micro-perspective and the increasing trend of the guiding effect is found, which provides an empirical evidence for the “signaling” mechanism and makes it more distinct.（2）It investigates the heterogeneity of guiding effect concerning the ownership of GVCs, and provides a reference for improving the management of the government’s policy-oriented funds by analyzing the differences of the project selection between the management agencies of different ownership.（3）The panel data analysis method is used to weaken the influence of individual heterogeneity and further deal with the endogeneity problem, which improves the accuracy and robustness of the research results.