TY  - UNPD
A1  - Coakley, Jerry
A1  - Cumming, Douglas J.
A1  - Lazos, Aristogenis
A1  - Vismara, Silvio
T1  - Enfranchising the crowd: nominee account equity crowdfunding
T2  - Center for Financial Studies (Frankfurt am Main): CFS working paper series ; No. 664
N2  - The nominee approach to equity crowdfunding pools all crowd investors into one (nominee) account where typically the platform acts as the legal owner but the crowd retains beneficial ownership. The platform plays an active digital corporate governance role that simultaneously enfranchises crowd investors with voting and ownership rights but removes the administrative burden on startups of having to deal with several hundred shareholders. Through an inter-platform and intra-platform analysis of a large sample of 1,018 initial equity crowdfunding campaigns, this paper assesses both the short-term and the long-term impact of nominee versus direct ownership. It finds that nominee initial campaigns are on average more successful than direct ownership campaigns in that they are more likely to succeed, raise more funds, attract overfunding and enjoy greater long run success in terms of successful seasoned equity crowdfunded offerings, numbers of such offerings, and probability of survival. These results hold inter-platform between the two main UK equity crowdfunding platforms (Seedrs and Crowdcube) as well as intra-platform, using the post-2015 quasi-natural experiment when the nominee approach became an option for startups raising capital on Crowdcube.
T3  - CFS working paper series - 664 
KW  - Entrepreneurial finance
KW  - corporate governance
KW  - nominee account
Y1  - 2021
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/62471
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-624712
UR  - https://ssrn.com/abstract=3969371
N1  - Coakley and Lazos are grateful to the ESRC for funding under grant number ES/L011859/1.
IS  - April 9, 2021
PB  - Center for Financial Studies
CY  - Frankfurt, M.
ER  -