私募基金为何偏好有限合伙制?——基于委托代理理论的分析

公司制下普通合伙人只能获得保留效用,利润剩余归有限合伙人所有。但在有限合伙制下,有限合伙人只能获得保留效用,利润剩余全归普通合伙人所有。有限合伙制,将货币资本所有权与经营权分离产生的委托代理问题内部化,在某种程度上解决了委托代理问题。有限合伙制相比公司制而言,激励程度更高,代理成本更低,更能充分发挥普通合伙人的人力资本优势,因此,成为私募基金的首选。     

从契约设计角度看中国私募证券基金企业创新发展的路径选择——通过比较分析公司制与有限合伙制私募企业的激励机制

按特定组织形式组建的私募企业具有特定的内部收益分配制度,而受益分配制度的设置实际上是一种契约设计,反映了基金投资人对基金管理人的激励特征。结合目前中国私募证券基金在组织形式上的创新需求,可以利用契约理论,对可供参考的两类私募企业组织形式:公司制与有限合伙制企业的收益分配制度所对应的契约激励机制进行比较分析,为中国私募证券基金在组织形式上的创新路径选择提供参考。     

我国有限合伙发展浅析

有限合伙制（Limited Partnership）是风险投资（Ventrue Capital,VC）及私募股权基金（Private Equity,PE）的主要运作模式,根据美国《统一有限合伙法》的规定,有限合伙是指在按照某一州的法律由两个或两个以上的人组成的合伙,其中包括一个或一个以上的一般合伙人（Limited Partner,LP）和一个或一个以上的有限合伙人（General Partner,GP）（刘成江、王素杰,2008）。     

有限合伙制风险投资机构财务治理研究——特性与现实

有限合伙制能够适应风险投资机构的发展,特殊的财务治理是重要原因。财务控制权方面,有限合伙人负责出资但不干预决策;普通合伙人掌握财务控制权但承担无限责任,这样可以实现权责的匹配并提高风险资本的效率。有限合伙人享有对普通合伙人的财务监督权。由于不参与决策和出资比例较高,有限合伙人行使财务监督权更加独立、高效和强有力。普通合伙人能够享有比其出资比例更高的财务收益分配权,这是由普通合伙人掌握的财务控制权决定的。在我国,有限合伙制将成为风险投资机构的主流形式。但由于有限合伙人企业治理思维没有转变,普通合伙人不成熟,订立的合伙契约不完善等原因,我国有限合伙制风险投资机构的财务治理还存在诸多问题,包括有限合伙人与普通合伙人角色模糊导致财务监督权取代财务控制权;财务收益分配权配置不合理等。     

论我国风险投资引入有限合伙制的对策

通过对美国风险投资有限合伙制的特点及成因的分析，结合中国风险投资机构治理方式的现状，提出中国的风险投资引入有限合伙制的战略对策：确立有限合伙制的合法性；为有限合伙制企业提供税收优惠；解除养老、保险基金等的进入限制，壮大有限合伙人实力；发展风险投资信息网络，催生一般合伙人群体；规范合伙契约，保护投资双方利益。     

合伙制私募股权基金微观控制权分配机制的博弈分析

我国合伙制私募股权基金(Private Equity,PE)内部管理中,普遍存在有限合伙人(Limited Partner-ship,LP)作为投资者过度干预普通合伙人(General Part nership,GP)正常经营,以及LP要求GP承诺最低保障收益,以决定PE下一步投资的情形,大大制约了PE经营运行的独立性和效率。文章通过博弈分析,从微观控制权分配机制角度,在合伙协议中,以虚拟设计的"要求出资、拒绝出资"等系列对抗性的组合选择期权为例,探讨如何通过互约双规的控制权分配机制,来减少LP的干预行为,提高GP的经营稳健性。     

外资设立人民币私募股权投资基金已经无法律障碍

“外资设立人民币私募股权投资基金已经没有法律障碍，但基金收益换汇汇出还需政策保障。”深圳市创业投资同业公会常务副会长兼秘书长王守仁日前表示。AVCJ获悉，商务部目前正在修改制定相关法律。王守仁表示，外资在国内设立人民币私募基金可采用公司制和有限合伙制，但相关程序还需完善。最大的问题是退出方式，     

私募基金的管理规模与最优激励契约

私募基金是一种新兴的资产管理模式,其本质上也是一种委托代理契约。本文利用Tirole(2006)的公司融资分析框架和思想,研究了私募基金管理者与基金外部投资人的委托代理关系,求解出私募基金的最优管理规模和分成比例,并用数值计算方法对理论结果进行了讨论。理论模型和数值计算表明:私募基金的最优管理规模和分成比例是存在的;只有在某些特定的参数组合下,现实中广泛使用的"2—20"合同才具有某种合理性,且并非最优;业绩表现费有助于降低私募基金管理者的道德风险。     

人力资本产权与企业制度创新

一、引言 现代企业理论认为，企业是以一种契约类型（企业契约）代替另一种契约类型（市场契约），代替的原因则在于与市场契约相比，企业所采取的这种新的契约类型能节约交易费用。企业这种新的契约与一般市场契约的本质区别在于，企业包含对人力资本的交易（购买），长期雇佣人力资本的契约一方（权威方）拥有对另一方的指挥，而市场契约不存在这一点（张五常）。     

困难时期基金的结构和调整

<正>当整个生态系统陷入压力时,私募股权领域固有的张力以及经济和金融各个层面的共同作用,可以使情况变得缓和。其中的一个方面就是普通合伙人和有限合伙人常年谈论的基金结构和利益调整问题。突如其来的杠杆     

Operating efficiency and output insensitive employment contracts for capital management

Summary This paper considers a problem in which an agent is hired to manage a capital investment and subsequently receives private information regarding the productivity of the capital investment. The capital manager must decide whether to invest capital supplied by the firm (the principal), or to divert these investment funds to perquisite consumption. If the manager decides to invest, the manager must then select the level of operating efficiency (productivity) of the capital investment, this latter choice being unobservable and constrained by the (maximal) productivity of the investment. In this setting we demonstrate that the optimal employment contract, from the perspective of the firm hiring the manager, is the contract whichminimizes the dependence of the manager's compensation on firm output. This contract pays the manager a fixed wage whenever output from the investment exceeds the wage and provides the manager with all of the projects rents whenever output falls below this level. Thus, we provide a setting in which fixed wage contracts are the optimal incentive contract even when agents are risk neutral and contracts can be costlessly written on future output.We would like to thank the participants in the Princeton Economics and Finance Workshop and the Ohio State University Finance Workshop for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The second author gratefully acknowledges the research support of the Georgia State College of Business Administration Research Council.     

Enforcement frictions and optimal lending contracts

I consider an environment in which contract enforcement is a decision variable for the principal. I construct a model in which entrepreneurs cannot commit to repaying investors for the capital advanced, but investors can force repayment by spending resources. The principal uses enforcement to reduce the resources available to the agent after a default, thus providing incentives for the agent to stay in the relationship. She also ensures contract compliance by backloading the payments to the agent: expected utility rises over time, preventing a default. I consider an application of the framework developed in the paper to the area of firm dynamics. I show that enforcement and backloading are always used jointly. Firm size (measured by capital) grows with time and each firm converges to the efficient size. A second application is to the field of economic development. Costlier enforcement leads to the choice of sub-optimal technology; secondly, it leads to inefficient dispersion of capital across establishments.     

Moral Hazard and Other-Regarding Preferences

The paper aims at obtaining new theoretical insights by combining the standard moral hazard models of principal–agent relationships with theories of other-regarding preferences, in particular inequity aversion theory. The principal is in general worse off, as the agent cares more about the wellbeing of the principal. When there are multiple symmetric agents who care about each other's wellbeing, the principal can optimally exploit their other-regarding nature by designing an appropriate interdependent contract such as a "fair" team contract or a relative performance contract. The approach taken in this paper can shed light on issues on endogenous preferences within organizations.     

Can Starving Start-ups Beat Fat Labs? A Bandit Model of Innovation with Endogenous Financing Constraint*

Is there any such thing as too much capital when it comes to the financing of innovative projects? We study a principal–agent model in which the principal chooses the scale of the experiment, and the agent privately observes the outcome realizations and can privately choose the novelty of the project. When the agent has private access to a safe but non-innovative project, the principal starves the agent of funds to incentivize risk-taking. The principal quickly scales up after early successes, and can tolerate early failures. If the principal is equally informed about the outcome, then the agent is well-resourced, resembling a large research and development department.     

Asymmetric awareness and moral hazard

This paper introduces asymmetric awareness into the classical principal–agent model and discusses the optimal contract between a fully aware principal and an unaware agent. The principal enlarges the agentʼs awareness strategically when proposing a contract and faces a tradeoff between participation and incentives. Leaving the agent unaware allows the principal to exploit the agentʼs incomplete understanding of the world, relaxing the participation constraint, while making the agent aware enables the principal to use the revealed contingencies as signals about the agentʼs action choice, relaxing the incentive constraint. The optimal contract reveals contingencies that have low probability but are highly informative about the agentʼs effort.     

Ethnic divisions,contract choice,and search costs in the Guatemalan land rental market

This paper shows how ethnic diversity in a context of weak property rights enforcement can result in market segmentation. The paper analyzes how contract enforcement problems affect the joint decision of partner and contract choice by landlords in the land rental market in Guatemala. The empirical method allows partner choice to be determined not only by the characteristics and relative scarcity of the specific landowner and tenant, but also by the characteristics of other potential tenants. The results show that landowners without formal title are more likely to restrict their partners to tenants from the same ethnic group. Partner choice is found to be less important for renting with interlinked land–labor contracts.     

Private equity characteristics and performance: An analysis of North American venture capital and buyout funds

The paper investigates the relationship between fund performance and fund characteristics of North American private equity (PE) funds, by analyzing the interactions of fund size, fund sequence, and past fund performance on traditional fund return measures. The empirical evidence is based on both linear and polynomial regressions, on a sample of 345 venture capital (VC) and 411 buyout (BO) funds with vintage year over the period 1995–2010. We document a concave relationship between fund size and performance, persistence in PE performance, as well as a convex relationship between fund sequence and performance. We suggest both the optimal fund size and the optimal fund sequence number. Economic implications for investors and general partners are discussed as well.     

Optimal contract theory with time-inconsistent preferences

This paper incorporates managers' time-inconsistent preferences into the classical DeMarzo and Sannikov (2006) contract model to study corresponding impacts on the optimal contract, corporate financial policies, and the optimal capital structure. The extended model shows that the impatience of the time-inconsistent agent has positive effects on the optimal payout decision which is opposite to DeMarzo and Sannikov (2006) and consequently provides a guideline to tailor the contract between investors and the agent. It also shows in the optimal capital structure, the total debt capacity shrinks with the degree of the agent's time inconsistency, and the long-term one shrinks more. In addition, our model predicts that the agent's time inconsistency not only imposes significant limits on the use of long-term debt but also has great effects on firms' capital structures. Thus our finding can potentially explain observed cross-sectional differences in firms' capital structures.     

Performance Standards and Incentive Pay in Agency Contracts

When the presence of limited liability restricts a principal from imposing monetary fines on an agent in case of poor performance, the principal might use other kinds of punishment threats to deter the agent from shirking. We show that under the optimal contract in this case, the principal sets a performance standard and punishes the agent if the standard is not met, but rewards the agent on a profit-sharing basis if the standard is significantly exceeded. The optimal choice of performance standards for such contracts is discussed. It is shown that punishment threats, although inefficient, often help the principal to discipline the agent.
JEL classification : D 82     

Tax policy, venture capital, and entrepreneurship

The paper studies the effects of tax policy on venture capital activity. Entrepreneurs pursue a single high risk project each but have no own resources. Financiers provide funds, covering investment cost plus an upfront payment, in exchange for a share in the firm. The contract must include incentives to enlist full effort of entrepreneurs. Venture capitalists also assist with valuable business advice to enhance survival chances. The paper develops a general equilibrium framework with a traditional and an entrepreneurial sector and investigates the effects of taxes on the equilibrium level of managerial advice, entrepreneurship and welfare. It considers differential wage and capital income taxes, a comprehensive income tax, progressive taxation as well as investment and output subsidies to the entrepreneurial sector.