The geography of initial coin offerings Huang, Winifred; Meoli, Michele; Vismara, Silvio
Small business economics,
06/2020, Letnik:
55, Številka:
1
Journal Article
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Initial coin offerings (ICOs) are a rapidly growing phenomenon wherein entrepreneurial ventures raise funds for the development of blockchain-based businesses. Although they have recently sprouted up ...all over the world, raising millions of dollars for earlystage firms, few empirical studies are available to help understand the emergence of ICOs across countries. Based on the population of 915 ICOs issued in 187 countries between January 2017 and March 2018, our study reveals that ICOs take place more frequently in countries with developed financial systems, public equity markets, and advanced digital technologies. The availability of investment-based crowdfunding platforms is also positively associated with the emergence of ICOs, while debt and private equity markets do not provide similar effects. Countries with ICO-friendly regulations have more ICOs, whereas tax regimes are not clearly related to ICOs.
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 in Crowdcube and 99 equity offerings on London’s Alternative Investment Market raising between £300,000 and £5 m, we find that companies with younger top management team (TMT) members are both more likely to launch equity crowdfunding offerings than IPOs and have higher chances to successfully complete an equity crowdfunding offering. Remotely located companies are more likely to launch equity crowdfunding offerings than IPOs and have higher chances to successfully complete an equity crowdfunding offering. On the contrary, female entrepreneurs do not have higher chances to raise funds in equity crowdfunding. Minority entrepreneurs do not have higher chances of successfully raising capital but do attract a higher number of investors. Overall, our evidence provides empirical guidance for the first time to the oft-repeated policy claim that equity crowdfunding democratizes entrepreneurial finance by providing access to funding to underrepresented groups of potential entrepreneurs.
•Metrics increasingly guide academic hiring and promotion.•Since 2010 Italian academics have to meet metrics thresholds to become professor.•Scientists quickly responded to citations metrics by ...increasing self-citations.•The increase was stronger for social scientists (up to +179%).•If not properly designed, metrics favour the diffusion of questionable practices.
There is limited knowledge on the extent to which scientists may strategically respond to metrics by adopting questionable practices, namely practices that challenge the scientific ethos, and the individual and contextual factors that affect their likelihood. This article aims to fill these gaps by studying the opportunistic use of self-citations, i.e. citations of one’s own work to boost metric scores. Based on sociological and economic literature exploring the factors driving scientists’ behaviour, we develop hypotheses on the predictors of strategic increase in self-citations. We test the hypotheses in the Italian Higher Education system, where promotion to professorial positions is regulated by a national habilitation procedure that considers the number of publications and citations received. The sample includes 886 scientists from four of science’s main disciplinary sectors, employs different metrics approaches, and covers an observation period beginning in 2002 and ending in 2014. We find that the introduction of a regulation that links the possibility of career advancement to the number of citations received is related to a strong and significant increase in self-citations among scientists who can benefit the most from increasing citations, namely assistant professors, associate professors and relatively less cited scientists, and in particular among social scientists. Our findings suggest that while metrics are introduced to spur virtuous behaviours, when not properly designed they favour the usage of questionable practices.
In contemporary higher education systems, funding is increasingly associated with performativity, assessment, and competition, and universities are seeking different forms of financing their ...activities. One of these new forms is crowdfunding, a tool enabled by the digitalization of finance. Based on data from the UK higher education system and two crowdfunding platforms, our study adds to previous crowdfunding research in academic settings that have, thus far, focused on research projects, and assesses who is participating, their level of engagement and the resources they have gathered from crowdfunding. Our findings show that crowdfunding is used more by universities that have fewer resources. These universities are more teaching-oriented, less prestigious, and have a student body largely derived from lower socio-economic sectors of society. The popularity of crowdfunding in this type of university suggests that crowdfunding may enhance the democratization of higher education funding. However, as optimal crowdfunding participation and engagement requires high academic-to-student ratios and total-staff-to-academic-staff ratios, universities facing a greater financial precarity may be disadvantaged in their access to and engagement with crowdfunding. Differentials between part-time and full-time student ratios may exacerbate this disadvantage. Our study suggests that crowdfunding is a viable means of obtaining additional financing for learning activities complementing the fundings from other sources, but raises concerns about the use of crowdfunding as a burden to academics and students to find resources to meet learning experiences that ought to be provided by universities in the first place.
Research Question/Issue
This study investigates the relationship between financial literacy and the survival profile of the security‐based crowdfunding platforms. Security‐based crowdfunding has ...recently emerged as a novel market that allows small investors to engage directly in financing entrepreneurial ventures. However, a certain level of financial literacy is required to understand and manage these digital finance tools. A better understanding of the impact of financial literacy is, therefore, central to the development of these markets and the achievement of their inclusive potential.
Research Findings/Insights
Using data of the universe of 432 security‐based crowdfunding platforms in 37 OECD countries from 2007 to 2019, we find higher platforms' survival profiles where the level of financial literacy is high. Financial literacy, however, needs to combine with specific platform characteristics to take full effect, as it matters more to those platforms that deliver voting rights and that provide poorer value‐added services to crowdfunding investors.
Theoretical/Academic Implications
This study provides empirical support to the role of governance mechanisms at the platform level for differences in the level of financial literacy across countries. As such, it contributes to literature both on financial literacy and corporate governance. Additionally, it extends previous research in crowdfunding to the platform level.
Practitioner/Policy Implications
This study calls for the attention of policymakers interested in the development of crowdfunding markets. The importance of financial literacy varies with the presence of governance mechanisms and information production at the platform‐level.
The introduction of competitive funding mechanisms in higher education is found to generally increase research productivity. However, the diversity within higher education systems may lead ...universities to behave in substantially different ways in response to the adoption of competitive funding criteria. In particular, we argue that the legitimacy of universities, defined as their level of recognition based on the adherence to socially accepted norms and expectations, is crucial in shaping their reaction. This paper investigates the change in research productivity experienced by Italian universities following the introduction of the first Performance-based Research Funding System (PRFS) in 2003, focusing on the moderating effect of university legitimacy. Using a sample of 75 universities observed during the period 1999–2011, we find that the introduction of PRFS leads to an increase in research productivity, and this increase is significantly more pronounced among more legitimate universities.
The entrepreneurial university is emerging as a new archetype of higher education institution that fosters knowledge generation and transfer, contributes to local development and empowers individuals ...in fast-changing markets. Many institutional, strategic and organizational factors have been discussed as components or contingencies of the process that makes universities more entrepreneurial. Yet we miss an understanding of the contribution that internationalization, crucial strategy for university competitiveness, can provide to such process. Our study addresses this gap, by looking at the effect of university internationalization on students' progressive engagement in entrepreneurship. We do so by studying internationalization along each of the three university institutional missions (teaching, research and third mission). Based on multilevel analysis on a sample of 25,855 university students across 130 European universities, our findings indicate that university internationalization matters, and with different mechanisms along the three missions; in fact, the effect of internationalization is both direct and indirect as it increases students' human capital but also enhances the impact of traditional university support and training mechanisms in favor of students' entrepreneurship.
Modern societies regularly face crises that have major disruptive effects. Learning from past crises can inform better choices and policies when facing a new one. Following the 2008 global financial ...crisis, higher education scholars explored its effects on students’ tuition fees through cuts in public funding. This article instead investigates how universities’ decisions on tuition fees have been affected by other factors, beyond the decrease in public funds. As such, it explores the role of competition and reputation in affecting universities’ decisions on tuition fees when facing a crisis. Using data from 59 public Italian universities in the period between 2003 and 2014, we found that universities increased tuition fee by an average of 27% per student in response to the crisis. At the same time, high competition mitigated the increase of tuition fees, except for the case of highly reputed universities, which charged even higher tuition. These findings highlight the importance of monitoring fees in times of crises, as well as the complex role of competition and reputation in containing or inflating university tuition fees.
This paper investigates the valuation and merger and acquisition (M&A) dynamics of the population of 254 biotech firms that went public in Europe between 1990 and 2009. Among these, we identify a ...high proportion (40%) of firms affiliated with a university or another public research organization. After controlling for intellectual capital and other possible determinants, we find that affiliation with a university is recognized as beneficial by investors. This affiliation enhances the valuation of the firms and the probability of being targeted in subsequent M&As, particularly in cross-border deals. We conclude that following the initial public offering acquisitions by incumbent firms are mechanisms to finalize the technology transfer process started in a research institute. Our findings allow us to derive implications for venture investors, academic entrepreneurs, university managers, and policymakers.
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