The nominee approach to equity crowdfunding pools all crowd investors into one (nominee) account where typically the platform acts as the legal owner but the crowd retains beneficial ownership. The platform plays an active digital corporate governance role that simultaneously enfranchises crowd...

A financial system can only perform its function of channelling funds from savers to investors if it offers sufficient assurance to the providers of the funds that they will reap the rewards which have been promised to them. To the extent that this assurance is not provided by contracts alone,...

Some of the most widely expressed myths about the German financial system are concerned with the close ties and intensive interaction between banks and firms, often described as Hausbank relationships. Links between banks and firms include direct shareholdings, board representation, and proxy...

The main objective of the present paper is to disentangle observed differences in the design of contracts across VC types into firm selection effects and corporate governance differences between VC types (different contracts). Based on a theoretical approach developed in the first part of the...

We analyze governance with a dataset on investments of venture capitalists in 3848 portfolio firms in 39 countries from North and South America, Europe and Asia spanning 1971-2003. We find that cross-country differences in Legality have a significant impact on the governance structure of...

We analyze the degree of contract completeness with respect to staging of venture capital investments using a hand-collected German data set of contract data from 464 rounds into 290 entrepreneurial firms. We distinguish three forms of staging (pure milestone financing, pure round financing and...

This paper analyzes the impact of blockownership dispersion on firm value. Blockholdings by multiple blockholders is a widespread phenomenon in the U.S. market. It is not clear, however, whether dispersion among blockholder is preferable to having a more concentrated ownership structure. To test...