This essay, based on the author's presentation last September to the annual meeting of the North American Securities Administration Association (NASAA), addresses several issues related to Rule 506, the most widely-used of the SEC's transactional exemptions from federal registration of...

The European Commission's Proposal for a Regulation on European Crowdfunding Service Providers (ECSPs) for businesses, since its presentation, has faced difficult trilateral negotiations among the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union. The length of...

The European Commission's Proposal for a Regulation on European Crowdfunding Service Providers (ECSPs) for businesses, since its presentation, has faced difficult trilateral negotiations among the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union. The length of...

Marketplace lending and investing have been recently attracting increasing regulatory attention. However, regulatory responses to such phenomenon have been extremely varied, even in Europe, characterized by maximum harmonization in the field of financial regulation, continuous efforts in...

The ECSPR covers only financial-return crowdfunding-FRC. Nonetheless, crowdfunding goes beyond monetary incentives: reward-based and donation-based crowdfunding represent the ‘other side of the moon’ in the crowdfunding universe. The Chapter, after describing the main features of...

Crowdfunding has been regarded as a useful tool to meet consumers’ and SMEs’ financing needs as well as investors’ need for diversified alternative investments finance and desire for a more ‘democratic’ financial system. It has also been presented as a form of ‘disintermediated’...

This study of initial public offerings (IPOs) carried out on the Berlin and London stock exchanges between 1900 and 1913 casts doubt on the received “law and finance” wisdom that legally mandated investor protection is pivotal to the development of capital markets. IPOs that resulted in...

Clearinghouses are systemic nodes in financial markets that handle trillions of dollars’ worth of transactions. Yet, these critical market infrastructures stand on fragile foundations. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act of 2010, the sweeping financial reform that followed the 2008 financial...