Using a comprehensive database of firms from 21 European countries over the period 1998–2008, we find that venture capital investment has a positive effect on the rate of new business creation. This is especially true in countries with higher entry costs, higher protection of intellectual property rights, and lower taxes on capital gains. Our results suggest that, controlling for country and industry characteristics, venture capital is beneficial to bringing new ideas to the marketplace in the shape of new companies.

This paper provides the first empirical evidence that bank regulation is associated with cross-border spillover effects through the lending activities of large multinational banks. We analyze business lending by 155 banks to 9,613 firms in 1,976 different localities across 16 countries. We find that lower barriers to entry, tighter restrictions on bank activities, and to a lesser degree higher minimum capital requirements in domestic markets are associated with lower bank lending standards abroad. The effects are stronger when banks are less efficiently supervised at home, and are observed to exist independently from the impact of host-country regulation.