This study examines how crowdfunding (relative to angel investing) influences subsequent venture capital (VC) investments for startups. After addressing the potential endogeneity using a bivariate Probit model with the propensity score matching, we find that crowdfunded startups and angel-backed...

This paper investigates whether gender, age, ethnicity, and geography affect the choice of equity crowdfunding offerings vs initial public offerings (IPO) on traditional stock markets and whether these characteristics increase the likelihood of a successful offering. Using 167 equity offerings...

Policy-makers expect equity crowdfunding to democratize entrepreneurial finance, by providing access to funding to underrepresented groups of potential entrepreneurs. This paper investigates whether gender, age, ethnicity, and geography affect the choice of equity crowdfunding offerings vs...

Initial coin offerings (ICOs) are a new financing instrument that allows start-ups to sell blockchain-based digital tokens for capital on the internet. This study tests the effects of disclosure of founders' background information and founding team's collective human capital on ICO outcomes. We...

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...

A survey of participants in a large-scale business plan competition experiment, in which winners received an average of US$50,000 each, is used to elicit beliefs about what the outcomes would have been in the alternative treatment status. Participants are asked the percent chance they would be...

Title III of the JOBS Act of 2012 (“Regulation Crowdfunding”) should encourage entrepreneurship by allowing startups and small businesses to sell stock online. Unfortunately, that law applied Depression-era securities-law concepts to peer-to-peer financing in the Internet era; as a result, it...

Over the past half-century, while self-employment has consistently accounted for around one in ten of the United States workforce, its composition has changed. Since 1970, industries with high startup capital requirements have declined from 53% of self-employment to 23%. This same time period...