Private business sales environments in the United Kingdom

When an owner-manager of a business firm decides to sell the company, it is not a trivial decision. Whether it is a sale forced by circumstances outside company control, or a positive, strategic choice, it is certainly significant. Moreover, the method of “exit,” the advice taken, and the deal that is eventually struck will clearly affect the nature of the owner's eventual lifestyle. In such circumstances, there are four choices open to the owner: (1) Sale to a third party; (2) Sale to the management and/or employees; (3) Public quotation on the Stock Exchange; (4) Liquidation.This research first analyzes the magnitude of activity in the United Kingdom in each of the above categories during the five-year period 1983–1987. The results show very clearly that there is a strategic loosening taking place in the corporate marketplace—more firms are being sold, and more owner-managers are choosing to exit from ownership of their firms. Moreover, the most frequently used exit route by far is that of the private advertized sale.The second part of this paper analyzes in detail the data for the private advertized sale. By means of principal-component analysis and cluster analysis seven, ecological incubator environments were constructed at a county level. Significant differences were observed between the environments in respect to private advertized sales, private advertized sales rates, and industrial structure. These results show clearly that the nature of the supply of owner-managers wishing to realize their ownership is geographically biased and is, in part, a reflection of the existing industrial and commercial base.     

Sequential simultaneous estimation of the mean and variance: The rate of convergence

We reconsider the problem of simultaneous estimation of the mean and variance of a normal distribution along the lines of Mukhopadhyay (1981), and derive the rate of convergence of the appropriately normalized stopping time to normality. The Berry-Esseen type results for randomly stoppedU-statistics have been utilized repeatedly in this context.     

The choice of licensing versus direct foreign investment in developing countries

For developing, technology-receiving countries, direct foreign investment is always better than licensing in the short run with sectoral immobility of capital. In the long run with perfect mobility of capital between sectors, the welfare rankings of the two scenarios are dependent upon the amount of domestic capital. The likely case is that the developing country would have a smaller amount of domestic capital than foreign investors, and hence licensing could yield higher national welfare.The authors are indebted to many useful comments of two anonymous referees. The authors, however, are solely responsible for any remaining shortcomings.     

The welfare economics of dominant-firm acquisitions

Conclusion The main results of this paper provide some analytic underpinning for a strict horizontal merger policy relating to dominant firms. However, even under standard assumptions, examples have been demonstrated where dominant/fringe firm mergers increase welfare. Most of these examples imply shutting down acquired facilities, a practice regarded as unfavorable evidence by the court in theStandard Oil case; consequently, they do not by themselves seem to offer much hope for raising economies as an antitrust defense. Finally, it should be noted that this paper has considered only single-product economies; economies of scope arising in multi-product (and multi-market) contexts could be large enough to justify dominant/fringe firm mergers⁹.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Economic Policy Office seminar, Antitrust Division, U. S. Department of Justice. The author is grateful to Marius Schwartz, other seminar participants and an anonymous referee of this journal for helpful comments. M. Daniel Westbrook and Brian Flynn kindly arranged for the calculations reported in Appendix C.     

International perspectives on the supply of informal venture capital

Despite major changes in the number and range of sources of finance for new and small ventures in the United Kingdom in recent years, there continues to be a shortage of risk capital for ventures actively seeking external equity finance. In the United States the informal venture capital market plays a major role in filling this equity gap, particularly in the early stages of venture development.However, there is little comparable information on the size of the informal venture capital pool in the United Kingdom or other European economies, despite recent recognition that the apparent underdevelopment of this market in the U.K. represents a major barrier to the development and growth of new ventures. This paper, therefore, presents the first analysis of the informal venture capital market in the U.K. and compares the characteristics and attitudes of U.K. informal investors with those in the U.S.The data reported in this paper have been obtained from a combination of postal survey and snowball sample techniques that generated useable information from 86 informal investors. Informal investors are playing an important role in venture financing in the U.K. in three ways: they make small scale investments in new and early stage ventures, where the equity gap is most significant; they are more permissive in their financing decisions than the formal venture capital industry in terms of having lower rejection rates, longer exit horizons, and lower target rates of return; and they invest locally and can thereby close the regional equity gap arising from the overconcentration of venture capital investment in the core South-East region in the U.K.In terms of demographics, U.K. informal investors share many of the characteristics of North American informal investors: they are predominantly male, with an entrepreneurial background, financially well-off without being super-rich, and identify investment opportunities from friends and business associates. There are a number of key differences, that may be attributable to differences in contextual factors such as personal tax regimes, regulatory environments, wealth distribution, and the structure of the formal venture capital and IPO markets. For example, U.K. informal investors are significantly older than those in the U.S. reflecting the influence of higher U.K. tax rates on the rate of capital and wealth accumulation.More generally, in comparison to U.S. investors, U.K. informal investors: have more investment opportunities brought to their attention; seriously consider more proposals but invest in no more opportunities; operate independently with syndication and joint investment relatively uncommon, reducing the average total investment per financing round available to ventures; fail to identify entrepreneurs themselves as a primary source of information on investment opportunities; have higher rate of return and capital gains expectations; are slightly less patient investors; and are rather less satisfied with the overall performance of their informal investment portfolios, reflecting intercountry and intertemporal variations in investment climate and conditions. It appears, therefore, that the general inefficiency of the informal capital market identified by Wetzel (1987) (which reflects the invisibility of informal investors, the fragmented nature of the market, and the imperfect channels of communication between investor and entrepreneur) is compounded in the U.K. case. The extent to which this reflects contextual differences on the one hand or simply a slower developmental process in the U.K. will only be common methodological basis. Based on the evidence presented in this paper, however, a key conclusion is that the information networks available to U.K. informal investors are less effective than those in North America, and in particular appear to contain lower quality information and a higher degree of redundant information. Specific forms of intervention in the market by, for example, stimulating the flow of information through the promotion of informal investment networking and brokerage services along the lines of U.S. and Canadian examples such as VCN and COIN therefore appear defensible.     

Network development in international project marketing and the impact of external facilitation

This article reports on an experiment in external facilitation of international project marketing activity. The case involved a large, World Bank funded project in China aimed at upgrading grain storage and handling facilities. An organization was established in Australia to bring together and support efforts by Australian firms to win a share of this project. Network-building, at a number of levels both in China and Australia, emerged from the qualitative study as a critical factor in effective project marketing. External facilitation played a positive role in the network-building process.