A cross-country investigation of micro-angel investment activity: The roles of new business opportunities and institutions

Success drivers of online equity crowdfunding campaigns

“…The main sources of external equity financing include business angels, venture capital funding, and most recently equity crowdfunding (Bapna, 2017;Brown et al, 2018;Drover et al, 2017). In addition, micro funders can play an important role (De Clercq et al, 2012).…”

“…Micro funders, or micro angels, can be defined as informal early-stage investors who contribute limited amounts of their personal financial and human capital resources to purchase equity in entrepreneurial ventures that are majority owned by others (Avdeitchikova, 2008;De Clercq et al, 2012;Szerb et al, 2007). The concept dates back to before the time of online crowdfunding can typically take place in offline contexts, often through personal relationships.…”

“…While family and friends have a very important role as providers of informal equity investments to new ventures, they tend to remain one-off investors (Riding, 2008). After exhausting these sources of "love money", many entrepreneurial ventures face a need for further external investments in order to continue to finance their operations and growth (De Clercq et al, 2012). However, they often find themselves facing a funding gap, as they have not yet developed sufficiently to become attractive to established investors of early-stage equity, most typically business angels and venture capitalists, or as they may have secured only part of their funding needs from these sources (Kleinert et al, 2018;Lam, 2010).…”

The Role of Access to Finance in Explaining Cross-National Variation in Entrepreneurial Activity: A Panel Data Approach

“…Several papers [10,11,[20][21][22] include the access to finance in the determinants of entrepreneurial activities across countries and the results are mixed. According to Kerr and Nanda [20], there are two main streams of research on the relevance of financing constraints for entrepreneurship.…”

“…The lack of financial resources is often considered as one of the main causes for not starting a new venture. Some studies showed that access to finance varies greatly from one country to another and might represent a key factor for entrepreneurial activity [8][9][10][11]. Previous papers measured access to finance in terms of access to credit (debt) or access to equity.…”