This book explores the best ways for governments to design venture capital investment incentives.
Venture capital is a multi-billion-dollar industry and a major driver of innovation and national growth. Investment in startup companies by venture capital funds helps finance new inventions and create wealth, economic growth, and jobs. However, because venture capital investment is highly risky and sensitive to market downturns, many governments around the world use special legal and tax incentives to help encourage this form of investment. Since the introduction of the first venture capital incentive in the USA in 1958, scores of venture capital incentives have come and gone. These incentives have experienced varied success, with some failing entirely.
Filling a gap in an important area, this book employs a legal and regulatory approach to examine venture capital policy from a global perspective. It uses an analytical framework to evaluate the design, implementation, and success of incentives, and looks at over 60 examples from 25 countries around the world.
The book is aimed at researchers and policy makers in law, finance and economics, as well as practitioners and investors in the venture capital space. The book introduces the legal aspects of venture capital investment and presents a list of leading practice guidelines and recommendations to help policy makers design effective, efficient, and appropriate venture capital incentives.
Tamara Wilkinson is Lecturer at the Faculty of Law, Monash University, Australia.
John Linarelli is Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh, USA.
Teresa Rodríguez de las Heras Ballell is Associate Professor of Commercial Law at University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain. She is also currently Sir Roy Goode Scholar at UNIDROIT, Rome (2021-22) and previously held the Chair of Excellence at Harris Manchester College, Oxford University.
Teresa is an arbitrator at the Madrid Court of Arbitration and the Spanish Court of Arbitration, a member of the Spanish Advertising Standards Tribunal (Autocontrol), member of the European Commission Expert Group on Liability and New Technologies, member of European Union Expert Group for the Observatory on the Online Platform Economy, Delegate for Spain before UNIDROIT and UNCITRAL Working Group VI on Security Interests, and member nominated by UNIDROIT of the Expert Study Group on a Fourth Protocol for the Cape Town Convention on International Security Interests.
She has held fellowships at the European Central Bank Legal Research Programme 2018 with a project on Fintech regulation, the Transatlantic Technology Law Forum, Stanford Law School, and was a Marie Curie Fellow at the Centre of European Law and Politics (ZERP), University of Bremen. In addition she has held visiting professorships at Oxford University, Toulouse 1 University Capitole, Columbia Law School, Tulane University Law School, the University of the Andes, the University of Turin, the University of Tokyo and University College London.
