Abstract
Since small and medium-sized enterprises and innovative start-ups always face greater difficulties in obtaining capital from traditional sources of finance, the development of alternative funding tools such as equity crowdfunding has helped them to bridge their financing gap. The purpose of this chapter is to examine which factors influence the performance of equity crowdfunding campaigns in the Italian equity crowdfunding market. The study is based on proprietary data that considers the entire Italian equity crowdfunding market, and analyses 175 projects from all Italian equity crowdfunding platforms between 2013 and 2018.
Campaigns’ success is driven by ex ante characteristics of the company itself, such as a large number of shareholders and the presence of an industrial partner among them. Since Italian equity crowdfunding is still in its infancy, the chapter is the first to explore success drivers right across the market. The results have practical implications relevant for seekers of both funding and crowdfunding platforms.
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- 1.
25.8% of financial assets held by Italian households is in the form of current accounts. Bank of Italy, 2018, Annual Report for 2017, Rome.
- 2.
Legislative Decree no. 179 of 18 October 2012 converted by Law no. 221 of 17 December 2012; Decree Law no. 76 dated 28 June 2013, also known as “Decreto Lavoro” (duly implemented by Law n. 99 dated 9 August 2013); Decree Law no. 3 dated 24 January 2015 (known as “Investment Compact” and duly implemented by Law no. 33 dated 24 March 2015); Law no. 232 dated 11 December 2016 (so-called 2017 Legge di Stabilità).
- 3.
Companies, which, according to their last annual or consolidated accounts, meet at least two of the following three criteria: an average number of employees during the financial year of less than 250, balance-sheet total not exceeding EUR 43,000,000 and annual net turnover not exceeding EUR 50,000,000.
- 4.
The register is established pursuant to Article 50, comma 5, of Legislative Decree No. 58/1998.
- 5.
TUF and the regulation adopted by Consob by means of resolution no. 18592 dated June 26, 2013.
- 6.
We excluded the offering regarding real estate companies.
- 7.
Five issuers undertook more than one campaign.
- 8.
Odds ratio is obtained by taking the exponential of the logit coefficient.
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Cosma, S., Grasso, A.G., Pagliacci, F., Pedrazzoli, A. (2019). Exploring Factors Influencing the Success of Equity Crowdfunding Campaigns: Findings from Italy. In: Gualandri, E., Venturelli, V., Sclip, A. (eds) Frontier Topics in Banking. Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Banking and Financial Institutions. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16295-5_3
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