Determinants of Hurdle Rate at Venture Capital Funds in South Korea

Using 2,234 fund-level data over a period of 20 years from 2002 to 2022 collected from the Disclosure Information of Venture Capital Analysis (DIVA), this paper examines the determinants of hurdle rate in the performance contracts between Limited Partners (LPs) and General Partners (GPs) of venture capital partnerships and further investigates the impact of the hurdle rate on the fund performance. The paper shows that the economic factors at the time of fund establishment – namely, fund characteristics, GP characteristics, fund classification, and the vintage year - explain about 34.4% of the total variation in the hurdle rate. Furthermore, this paper also shows that the hurdle rate predicted ex-ante by the economic factors is positively correlated with ex-post performance of the fund while the discretionary (i.e. unpredicted) hurdle rate is negatively correlated with ex-post performance of the fund. To the best of authors