does my contribution to your crowdfunding project matter abstract in this study we consider the dynamics of crowdfunding project support over time we propose that people support crowdfunding projects financially when they believe that their contribution will make an impact because perceptions of impact are positively related to goal proximity we predict that support for a crowdfunding project will increase as the project funding approaches its target goal in addition because motivation decreases after a goal is attained we further predict that crowdfunding contributions will significantly decrease after the target goal is reached we find strong support for these hypotheses from a large scale field study involving kickstarter furthermore we show that several factors related to the expected impact moderate the effects of goal proximity that is the positive effect of goal proximity on project support is accentuated if the project is nearing its funding deadline if the target goal is relatively small or if the project has limited early support

the economics of small business finance the roles of private equity and debt markets in the financial growth cycle abstract this article examines the economics of financing small business in private equity and debt markets firms are viewed through a financial growth cycle paradigm in which different capital structures are optimal at different points in the cycle we show the sources of small business finance and how capital structure varies with firm size and age the interconnectedness of small firm finance is discussed along with the impact of the macroeconomic environment we also analyze a number of research and policy issues review the literature and suggest topics for future research

micro economic applications of marginal changes in risk abstract extending a recent definition we propose a theorem on the impact of marginal changes in risk on the optimal decision of a risk averse individual several micro economic applications are then provided

comparative statics of changes in risk on monotonically and partially responsive kinked payoffs abstract this paper derives two sets of necessary and sufficient conditions on the comparative statics of changes in risk under kinked payoff functions that are monotonically responsive and partially responsive to the realization of risk respectively the former case includes the newsboy problem with backorder the latter case includes the newsboy problem without backorder and under some restrictions also includes the optimal deductible insurance problem some relatively non restrictive conditions derived from the necessary and sufficient conditions reveal that the three problems can be quite different even though they are often viewed in the literature as being congruous these conditions lead to simple predictions of the direction of change in any risk averse agent s optimal choice upon a change in risk without assuming specific functional forms for the utility function

outside enterpreneurial capital this article investigates factors that affect rejection rates in applications for outside finance among different types of investors banks venture capital funds leasing firms factoring firms trade customers and suppliers partners and working shareholders private individuals and other sources taking into account the non randomness in a firm s decision to seek outside finance the data support the traditional pecking order theory further the data indicate that firms seeking capital are typically able to secure their requisite financing from at least one of the different available sources however external finance is often not available in the form that a firm would like this article engages with four interrelated empirical questions first what are the characteristics of privately held entrepreneurial firms that seek external outside finance and what drives the request for capital from the different potential sources of external finance banks venture capitalists private individuals leasing factoring suppliers customers partners working shareholders among other sources second what are the factors that lead to rejection or acceptance of requests for external finance given this non randomness in the types of firms that seek external finance in the spirit of heckman 1976 1979 third as various forms of financing are far from being perfect substitutes are there differences in the ability of firms to obtain capital from the different available sources fourth can firms obtain all of their desired capital from the different available sources even if it is not in the form they would like it is widely recognised that the decision to seek external finance and the type of financing sought is related to information asymmetries faced by investors regarding the entrepreneurial firm s quality see for example jensen and meckling 1976 1 where

crowdfunding and innovation crowdfunding and innovation entrepreneurs have started relying on crowdfunding to fund their investments this paper surveys the literature linking crowdfunding with innovation in entrepreneurial firms two distinct areas are discussed first crowdfunding has the potential to foster innovation by offering new sources of capital to innovation driven firms and thereby reduce the funding gap for innovative startups second crowdfunding offers a way for the crowd to participate in the innovation process by providing feedback to the entrepreneur this feedback can take various forms including providing ideas on the development of the product during and after the campaign in the spirit of crowdsourcing and providing valuable information on the future demand for the new product

immigration and equity home bias abstract why do investors hold such large positions in domestic equity when there are gains to be made from international diversification this equity home bias puzzle has received considerable attention in the literature with asymmetric information on domestic and foreign assets whether by individual choice or by market imperfection emerging as the most plausible explanation what happens when we consider a subset of investors whose information sets are closer to investors in foreign countries i assess the relationship between immigration and equity home bias and find that inward migration is positively correlated with increased foreign equity positions and reduced home bias looking across income groups outward migration reduces home bias for relatively rich countries but may actually increase home bias when migration occurs to or from a developing country these results suggest that immigration generates a positive externality of increased information flows for developed countries but not for developing nations the effects of immigration on investment are strongest within the euro zone suggesting that this positive externality of immigration is largest when barriers to portfolio diversification such as currency risk are lowest

contemporary topics in finance a collection of literature surveys finance plays a critical function in economies and continues to evolve in practice complemented by research policy and regulation the articles in this special issue provide up to date reviews of contemporary topics in finance unconventional monetary policy implicit bank guarantees and financial fraud are in various ways associated with rethinks stimulated by the global financial crisis the topics of inflation risk premia finance and productivity angel investing venture capital relationship lending and microfinance have benefitted from increased research associated with more data and use in practice the final two topics of crowdfunding and crypto currencies are the products of recent technological developments

what s in a picture evidence of discrimination from prosper com abstract we find evidence of significant racial disparities in a new type of credit market known as peer to peer lending loan listings with blacks in the attached picture are 25 to 35 percent less likely to receive funding than those of whites with similar credit profiles despite the higher average interest rates charged to blacks lenders making such loans earn a lower net return compared to loans made to whites with similar credit profiles because blacks have higher relative default rates these results provide insight into whether the discrimination we find is taste based or statistical

is the growth of small firms constrained by internal finance this paper examines the long standing theory that the growth of small firms is often constrained by the quantity of internal finance under plausible assumptions when financing constraints are binding an additional dollar of internal finance should generate slightly more than an additional dollar of growth in assets this quantitative prediction should not hold for the relatively small number of firms which access external equity we test these predictions with a panel of more than 1 600 small firms and find that the growth of most firms is constrained by internal finance our results have implications for several different research literatures including models of firm growth

the effect of entrepreneurial rhetoric on microlending investment an examination of the warm glow effect microlending provides a valuable alternative to traditional financing for entrepreneurs in impoverished countries drawing from theory on political rhetoric and the concept of warm glow giving we examine characteristics of entrepreneurial narratives that are related to how quickly entrepreneurs receive funding using a sample of 6051 narratives from entrepreneurs in developing countries we demonstrate that narratives higher in language indicating blame and present concern lead to more rapid funding while narratives higher in accomplishment tenacity and variety lead to slower funding our findings suggest that the presentation of investment profiles should be carefully managed to maximize funding likelihood

increases in risk and deductible insurance abstract this paper examines how mean preserving transformations in the loss distribution affect the optimal level of deductibility in an insurance contract if marginal utility is convex increases in risk affecting losses only below the deductible are shown to lead to a reduction in coverage higher deductible which can be viewed as an increase in precautionary savings on the other hand a transformation that spreads losses more towards the tails of the distribution leads to an increase in coverage lower deductible whenever preferences exhibit nonincreasing absolute risk aversion

introduction funding gaps theoretical and empirical foundations of government policies to plug alleged business funding gaps are highly controversial but rarely subject to wide ranging in depth debate this symposium from major scholars in the field provides a counterbalance topics addressed cover the theory of lending under asymmetric information its implications for overlending relationship lending as a market solution to information asymmetries government emulation of private sector decision making to eliminate underprovision of high tech equity and theoretically based empirical work testing for funding deficiencies in the high tech sector despite the very different and potentially contradictory contributions the result is surprisingly a set of mutually agreed policy conclusions

the design of an optimal insurance policy almost every phase of economic behavior is affected by uncertainty the economic system has adapted to uncertainty by developing methods that facilitate the reallocation of risk among individuals and firms the most apparent and familiar form for shifting risks is the ordinary insurance policy previous insurance decision analyses can be divided into those in which the insurance policy was exogenously specified see john gould jan mossin and vernon smith and those in which it was not see karl borch 1960 and kenneth arrow 1971 1973 in this paper the pioneering work of borch and arrow the derivation of the optimal insurance contract form from the model is synthesized and extended

the comparative statics of cumulative distribution function changes for the class of risk averse agents abstract the primary question addressed is when does a particular change in the cumulative distribution function cdf describing a random variable always cause all risk averse decision makers to adjust the choice variable in the same direction a necessary and sufficient condition involving both the decision model and the cdf change is derived this condition allows the researcher to determine the tradeoff between assumptions on the economic model and the cdf changes which are necessary and or sufficient to yield determinate comparative static results several applications are included

crowdfunding and regional entrepreneurial investment an application of the crowdberkeley database abstract crowdfunding platforms enable individuals to solicit small investments donations or loans over the internet from a wide variety of funders they have emerged as a new and potentially important source of funds for entrepreneurial and philanthropic initiatives we build and present three databases for public use including kickstarter kiva and crowdrise and link regional measures of kickstarter to entrepreneurial ventures listed in crunchbase we find that kickstarter projects in a region correlate with increased angel investing activity even after instrumenting with projects that should not be of interest to investors the paper describes scraping tools database schema descriptive statistics dashboards access for research and policy use and general reflections on building open databases for the research community

risk aversion and wealth evidence from person to person lending portfolios we estimate risk aversion from investors financial decisions in a person to person lending platform we develop a method that obtains a risk aversion parameter from each portfolio choice since the same individuals invest repeatedly we construct a panel data set that we use to disentangle heterogeneity in attitudes toward risk across investors from the elasticity of risk aversion to changes in wealth we find that wealthier investors are more risk averse in the cross section and that investors become more risk averse after a negative housing wealth shock thus investors exhibit preferences consistent with decreasing relative risk aversion and habit formation data as supplemental material are available at http dx doi org 10 1287 mnsc 2015 2317 this paper was accepted by amit seru finance

access to finance for innovative smes since the financial crisis in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis there has been increased focus on access to finance for small firms research from before the crisis suggested that it was harder for innovative firms to access finance yet no research has considered the differential effect of the crisis on innovative firms this paper addresses this gap using a dataset of over 10 000 uk sme employers we find that innovative firms are more likely to be turned down for finance than other firms and this worsened significantly in the crisis however regressions controlling for a host of firm characteristics show that the worsening in general credit conditions has been more pronounced for non innovative firms with the exception of absolute credit rationing which still remains more severe for innovative firms the results suggest that there are two issues in the financial system the first is a structural problem which restricts access to finance for innovative firms the second is a cyclical problem has been caused by the financial crisis and has impacted relatively more severely on non innovative firms

precautionary saving in the small and in the large the theory of precautionary saving is shown to be isomorphic to the arrow pratt theory of risk aversion making possible the application of a large body of knowledge about risk aversion to precautionary saving and more generally to the theory of optimal choice under risk in particular a measure of the strength of the precautionary saving motive analogous to the arrow pratt measure of risk aversion is used to establish a number of new propositions about precautionary saving and to give a new interpretation of the dreze modigliani substitution effect copyright 1990 by the econometric society