Coller Institute of Venture at Tel Aviv University 
Miguel de Oliveira Tavares Gärtner was born in Porto, Portugal on 18th July 1985. After completing his undergraduate studies at Colégio Luso-Francês, he was admitted to the School of Economics of the University of Porto in 2003, where he graduated in Management in 2007. He was an Erasmus Exchange student on the academic year 2005/2006, in which he attended the School of Business and Economics of the University of Jyväskyla in Finland.
Miguel initiated his work experience in 2006 through a Summer Internship in Millennium bcp. He started his first full-time job on September, 2007 as a Corporate Finance consultant at Deloitte, where he first got contact with entrepreneurs, corporations, investors, private equity firms, insolvencies and (obviously) consultants, from a wide range of industries. The chance to view investment decisions through the eyes of “real” investors came in 2011, where Miguel joined Inter-Risco – one of the major Portuguese independent private equity firms.
Miguel was admitted as a part-time student to the Doctoral Programme in Business and Management Studies at the School of Economics of the University of Porto in 2009. After completing his coursework in 2012 and presenting his thesis project on January, 2013, his research plan was concluded on April, 2016.
Work Abstract
Should Public Venture Capitalists Invest, Co-Invest, or Not Invest in Start-Up Firms?
Miguel Tavares-Gärtner§‡, Paulo J. Pereira§‡1 and Elísio Brandão§
§ School of Economics, University of Porto
‡ CEF.UP and School of Economics, University of Porto
We depict the decision faced by Public Venture Capitalists (PVCs) and Governments on the best mechanism to promote the investment in Start-up Firms: should PVCs invest directly in Start-up Firms, or should they co-invest alongside Independent Venture Capitalists (IVCs), should they let IVCs invest? Focusing on the economic payoffs earned by PVCs and IVCs, we model each of the alternative investing mechanisms as real options and illustrate that co-investing might be the most effective mechanism in anticipating optimum investment timing. Grounded on this theoretical framework, we list a set of both public policy and managerial implications, derive a set of empirically testable propositions on the determinants of PVC investment volumes and analyze their prevalence on a sample of European countries. Even though taxation proved not to be correlated with PVC investment volumes, the remaining results provide overall empirical support to our theoretical hypothesis.