Capital-investissement | EPFL Graph Search

Le capital-investissement (en anglais : private equity) est un mode d'investissement de capital où un investisseur ou fonds d'investissement utilise des capitaux pour acheter des parts d'une entreprise. Secteur de la finance considéré comme très prestigieux, les professionnels du private equity sont régulièrement décrits comme les ou encore . Concept Définition Le capital-investissement consiste, stricto sensu, en une augmentation de capital d'une entreprise par un apport d'une autre entreprise spécialisée dans l'investissement. Le capital-investissement (private equity) est private car il est apporté à des entreprises qui ne sont pas cotées en bourse. Le private equity s'oppose au public equity, qui désigne des titres qui ont fait l'objet de procédures de cotation publique sur un marché. Parce que les opérations de private equity ont lieu sur les marchés de gré à gré et non sur les places boursières, les obligations réglementaires et régulations liées au pri

Essays on the Role of Policy and Venture Financing in Clean Technology Innovation

Matthias David van den Heuvel

This thesis aims to provide novel analyses and data that improve the understanding of the financing of investments in clean technologies. In particular, this thesis explores the role that private and public actors play in supporting young innovative firms. The first chapter of this thesis exploits original data on about 1000 startups that have participated in Venture Kick, the leading Swiss venture competition. We study the circumstances under which venture competitions' certification and cash prize impact startups' future survival and funding prospects. On the one hand, we observe that the certification only has a significant effect on startups whose quality can be more objectively assessed by experts (e.g., hard sciences startups). On the other hand, we find that the competition's cash prize only extends the runway of startups with low running costs (e.g., internet & mobile). These results highlight industry-specific heterogeneity in the effect of early-stage startup support, which bears implications for the design of entrepreneurial programs.The second chapter takes a step back and looks into the role of two prominent actors involved in financing new clean technologies: venture capital (VC) and governments. This essay examines the reasons behind the failure of the VC boom in clean energy startups in the early 2010s. We find that lackluster demand for clean energy products and a lower potential for outsized returns make clean energy firms less attractive to VC than startups in ICT or biotech. Conversely, characteristics such as high-capital intensity or long development timeframe seem to be less important. These findings suggest that the most effective way for governments to improve the attractiveness of early-stage clean energy investments is to implement demand-side policies rather than to provide direct financial support. With demand-side policies in place, governments could then try to plug the remaining funding gaps themselves by targeting startups with limited potential for outsized returns.In the second half of this thesis, the focus shifts onto governments' environmental policies and how they affect private investments in clean technologies. In the third chapter, we develop novel news-based indices of US environmental policy using text-mining techniques. We show that our general environmental policy index and sub-topic indices (e.g., renewables or climate negotiation) meaningfully capture the evolution of environmental policy in the United States. Using these indices, we find that greater salience of environmental policy is associated with increased VC investments in clean technologies and reduced stock returns for high-emissions firms. In the fourth and last chapter, we study the impact of policy uncertainty on private investment decisions. To do so, we construct a novel index of environmental policy uncertainty (EnvPU). This index reveals that uncertainty is pervasive in the history of environmental policy and is often synchronized with election cycles. We find that increases in our EnvPU index are associated with lower VC investments in cleantech startups and higher volatility in green firms' stocks. The findings from Chapters 3 and 4 suggest that, while the increased salience of environmental policy can boost investments, policymakers should ensure that their actions do not exacerbate policy uncertainty and hinder investments towards a low-carbon economy.

EPFL2022

Environmental innovation, policy and economic performance

Claudia Pellegrin

The objective of this thesis is to investigate three economic issues related to environmental innovation: evaluating how private investments in environmental innovation react to technological policy; testing whether environmental policy harms economic performance; analyzing whether and how energy-saving process innovation impacts economic performance. This thesis provides novel empirical evidence on these issues by means of econometric analysis on firm-level data. The results from this thesis show that firms' environmental investments react positively to the highest amounts of public subsidy. Environmental policy, contrarily to the expectations, enhances economic performance of firms. Lastly, energy-saving process innovation does not play a significant role in reducing production costs of firms. These results suggest that environmental and economic goals are not in trade-off at the current state and that energy saving is not an incentive per se. Thus, strengthening both environmental policy and technological policy for environmental innovation is recommended.

EPFL2017

Corporate investment and financing under asymmetric information

Erwan Morellec, Norman Schuerhoff

We develop a dynamic model of corporate investment and financing decisions in which corporate insiders have superior information about the firm's growth prospects. We show that firms with positive private information can credibly signal their type to outside investors using the timing of corporate actions and their debt-equity mix. Using this result, we show that asymmetric information induces firms with good prospects to speed up investment, leading to a significant erosion of the option value of waiting to invest. Additionally, we demonstrate that informational asymmetries may not translate into a financing hierarchy or pecking order over securities. Finally, we generate a rich set of testable implications relating firms' investment and financing strategies, abnormal announcement returns, and external financing costs to a number of managerial, firm, and industry characteristics. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

2011

Essays on the Role of Policy and Venture Financing in Clean Technology Innovation

Matthias David van den Heuvel

EPFL2022