We study the extent of fraud in initial coin offerings (ICOs), and whether information disclosure prior to the issuance predicts fraud. We document different types of fraud, and that fraudulent ICOs are on average much larger than the sample average. Issuers that disclose their code on GitHub...

The increasing pervasiveness of technology-driven firms that offer financial services has led to growing pressure on traditional banks to modernize their core business activities and services. Many banks tackle the challenges of digitalization by cooperating with startup firms that offer...

In this paper, we show that too strong investor protection may harm small firms and, thus, entrepreneurial initiatives. This situation is particularly relevant in crowdinvesting, which refers to a recent financial innovation originating on the Internet. In general, securities regulation offers...

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...

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...

It is often assumed that entrepreneurs retain more control of their venture when they opt for equity crowdfunding as compared to venture capital, notably because crowd investors are passive. We study whether crowd investors are indeed passive by analysing the cash flow and control rights crowd...