Peer-to-business lending refers to online platforms facilitating loans from individuals to smalland medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). We conjecture that easy-to-understand risk ratings conveyed by the platform play a pronounced role in influencing the borrowing success of SMEs and that more...

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...

We use hand-collected data of 20,460 investment decisions and two distinct portals to analyze whether investors in equity crowdfunding direct their investments to local firms. In line with agency theory, the results suggest that investors exhibit a local bias, even when we control for family and...

In this article, we examine how investor motives affect investment behavior in equity crowdfunding. In particular, we compare the investment behavior of sustainability-oriented with ordinary crowd investors on six leading equity crowdfunding platforms in Austria and Germany and investigate...

The increasing pervasiveness of technology-driven firms that offer banking services has led to a growing pressure on traditional banks to modernize their core business activities. Banks attempt to confront the challenges of digitalization by cooperating with financial technology firms (fintechs)...

Today, start-ups often obtain financing via the Internet through many small contributions of non-sophisticated investors. Yet little is known about whether these start-ups can ultimately build enduring businesses. In this paper, we hand-collected data from 38 different equity crowdfunding (ECF)...

What role does the selection of an investor and the timing of financing play in initial coin offerings (ICOs)? We investigate the operating and financial performance of ventures conducting ICOs with different types of investors at different points in the ventures' life cycle. We find that,...

During the past decade, equity crowdfunding (ECF) has emerged as an alternative funding channel for startup firms. In Germany, the Small Investor Protection Act became binding in July 2015, with the legislative goal to protect investors engaging in this new asset class. Since then, investors...