The effect of asset composition strategy on venture capital firm efficiency: An application of data envelopment analysis

Abstract

The Korean government has driven the venture capital market since KTB Network was created in 1981 to provide capital to the high tech firms. Due to the venture policy, the venture capital market has undergone a compressed growth in a short period of time. In 1986, the government enacted the "Small and Medium Business Start-up Support Act" and "Finance Act to Support New Technology Businesses" to provide legal bases to establish venture capital (VC) firms. The government pushed the VC firms to carry out equity investments on small and medium businesses within the age of 7 years. Hence, the Korea Development Bank Capital and TG Venture, the archetypes of today's VC firms, have been established to finance high tech firms such as Medison, Mirae, and Sambo Computer (Lee 2003). In spite of the efforts made by the government, until the mid-1990s, there were problems in constructing the venture capital market, due to poor system to finance technology and lack of policy measures to support the high tech firms. There was no exit system to liquidize the equity investments, and most of the investment targets were from mature industries which brought low returns. Further debt financing was preferred to equity investment because of the low risk and high interest rate. This paper is organized as follows. Chapter 2 presents the literature reviewed and the hypotheses proposed. In Chap. 3, methodologies are presented while in Chap. 4, the data and the variables are presented. In Chap. 5, the effect of asset composition strategies on operating efficiency is estimated and analyzed. In Chap. 6, the estimation results are reviewed and policy implications addressed. © 2009 Physica-Verlag Heidelberg.