The Performance of Listed European Innovative Firms

European venture capital has gained increasing interest in the latest years by academics, practitioners and policy makers: its relevance in this area has been growing, and firms located in European countries have attracted a substantial share of the investments. Traditionally the literature identifies venture capital (VC) as the form of investment in start-up and growth companies, which is particularly fitted to overcome the asymmetries of information characterizing new businesses and firms which are living a series of changes (Gompers, 1995; Brav and Gompers, 1997). VC is also able to boost the performance of the target companies thanks to its value-added services, in terms both of sales growth and employment (Grilli and Murtinu, 2014; Paglia and Harjoto, 2014) and of stock performance (Bessler and Seim, 2012), or with reference to corporate governance (Farag et al., 2014), although the real contribution of VC might depend on the context (Rosenbusch et al., 2013).