Angel Investing: A Literature Review

Even though scholars have amassed a large body of research on angel investors, few systematic and comprehensive reviews are available. The purpose of this monograph is to review this literature and then to offer suggestions for future investigation. To that end, we compiled a set of journal articles on angel investing. We start with Wetzel’s (1983) seminal article describing the characteristics of angel investors and end with the work published more recently. In total, we have 152 articles that we review. For parsimony, we chose to focus our review only refereed journal articles, thereby excluding conference proceedings, books and book chapters, industry reports, and dissertations. This implies that there is additional work that has been done on the topic of angel investing that is not covered by our monograph. For this, we offer our apologies. However, we did include studies using data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) because these capture early stage financing globally. GEM defines angel investment a little differently than we do in the monograph, in that in GEM they include early stage family and friends money as angel investment. This is likely due to the international nature of the GEM data collection and the lack of a robust angel investment community internationally. In the final chapter, we have included a table that breaks out the GEM studies, to better represent the data.