NBER Working Papers by Yishay Yafeh

We compare sources of funds and investment activities of venture capital (VC) funds in Germany, Israel, Japan and the UK using a newly constructed data set. The data provide a rare opportunity to evaluate relations between funds' sources of finance and activities. We find that sources of VC funds differ significantly across countries, e.g. banks are particularly important in Germany, corporations in Israel, insurance companies in Japan, and pension funds in the UK. VC investment patterns also differ across countries in terms of the stage, sector of financed companies and geographical focus of investments. These differences in investment patterns are related to the variations in funding sources - for example, bank and pension fund backed VC's invest in later stage activities than individual...

This paper reviews the literature on corporate groups in Japan and elsewhere, and offers a comparison of Japan's corporate groups with groups in other developed and developing countries. It then proceeds to examine the evolution of corporate groups in Japan since the mid-1970s. The main conclusions that emerge are that: 1. Empirical evidence on the economic roles of corporate groups in Japan is limited. 2. Japanese groups are, in some respects, quite similar to groups in other countries, but their risk and return characteristics differ substantially. 3. There is little to suggest that over the past thirty years groups have had a major impact on Japan's industrial structure. In view of these findings, and because there is no evidence that Japanese groups (unlike those in some other countrie...