Public policy towards entrepreneurial finance: Spillovers and the scale-up gap

Abstract

Research in the area of public policy towards entrepreneurial finance has traditionally been focused on financing gaps, and whether or not government programmes successfully address or mitigate those financing gaps. More recently, a growing literature has identified externalities across different forms of entrepreneurial finance. These externalities include but are not limited to spillovers from one form of finance to another (such as from crowdfunding to venture capital, etc.), spillovers from domestic to international investment, and spillovers from early stage to late stage investment. Sometimes these externalities are positive and at other times they are negative. In this paper, we review what is known about these spillovers and highlight a need to better understand these spillovers for the optimal design of a government's portfolio of policy towards entrepreneurial finance.