Various forms of social learning and network effects are at work on crowdfunding platforms, giving rise to informational and payoff externalities. We use novel entrepreneur-backer data to study how these externalities shape funding dynamics, within and across projects. We find that backers...

The Internet-based crowdinvesting market in Europe has developed significantly since its start in 2007 and has become an alternative source of finance for entrepreneurs to sell securities through the Internet to small investors. This market evidences a great variety in platform design and...

Various forms of social learning and network effects are at work on crowdfunding platforms, giving rise to informational and payoff externalities. We use novel entrepreneur-backer data to study how these externalities shape funding dynamics, within and across projects. We find that backers...

This paper first presents the development of the crowdinvesting market in Europe since its start in 2007. Then, using hand-collected data on the complete set of crowdinvesting campaigns run in Germany, the paper shows that successful campaigns tend to be launched by new startups and when the...

We use hand-collected data from four German crowdinvesting portals to analyze what determines individual investment decisions in crowdinvesting. In contrast with the crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter where the typical pattern of project support is U-shaped, we find crowdinvesting dynamics to...

Equity crowdfunding is a new form of entrepreneurial finance, in which investors do not receive perks or engage in pre-purchase of the product, but rather participate in the future cash flows of a firm. In this paper, we analyze what determines individual investment decisions in this new...

In this paper, we show that too strong investor protection may harm small firms and entrepreneurial initiatives, which contrasts with the traditional ‘law and finance' view that stronger investor protection is better. This situation is particularly relevant in equity crowdfunding, which refers...