VC green investments 2010-2019
Description
We built an ad-hoc dataset gathering data from two main sources. We used one database which contains comprehensive coverage of information about VCs’ investments, and it is frequently used by scholars investigating the VC market and the OECD Environmental Policy Stringency Index Database that contains information about environmental policies on a year and country level. We first selected all startups for which top investors’ names were available, founded between 2010 and 2019. We chose the 2010 because it was a year after the Kyoto Protocol that entered into force on 2005 and bounded 192 countries worldwide to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, by choosing such a time window we also avoided the financial crisis of 2007-2009 that has unpredictably impacted the VC market (Conti et al., 2019). Similarly, we chose the 2019 to avoid considering the Covid-19 period. Thus, we collected all the top investors who have invested in such startups obtaining a strongly-balanced panel of 3,473 IVCs, CVCs, and GVCs’ unique investors, which have made 16,761 total investments on 12,711 unique startups within 2010 and 2019. The panel contains the number of cumulated investments and the funding amounts invested by each investor in both green and non-green startups. Particularly, the classification of green startups has been made according to endogenous keyword selection through AI, starting from the Crunchbase startup industry classification. 60 keywords were selected by ChatGPT across 10 iterations, representing green industries (see Appendix A). The unit of analysis of the investigation is represented by the VCs. The OECD policy database, containing a selection of the most prominent environmental policies in force in the OECD countries and more, was leveraged to measure the moderating role of such public regulations.