Is Crowdfunding Still on the Rise?
Crowdfunding is the process of raising capital online from a large audience. It began developing in the mid-2000s with the launch of peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms like Zopa in the…
The US Presidential Election and the Stock Market
The outcome of the US presidential election is still highly uncertain, and with it the future direction of the country’s economic policy. In this blogpost, I explore why stock markets may…
Decentralizing Bank Supervision
The supervisory architecture of the financial system determines how oversight responsibilities and powers are distributed among policy institutions. In Europe, the global financial crisis (GFC) sparked an intense debate over…
Democratizing Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Kickstarter
By opening a new market for raising outside funds for individuals and businesses, crowdfunding has the potential to boost entrepreneurship and contribute to growth. Policy support for crowdfunding in various…
Politics, Corporations, and the Common Good
On October 20, 2023, the third edition of our CEPR Conference Series on the Political Economy of Finance took place in the beautiful Wereldmuseum in Rotterdam. This edition gathered a…
Governor Appointments and Central Bank Independence
Since the late 1980s, many countries have reformed the legal frameworks governing central banks to protect these institutions from undue political influence and safeguard price (and financial) stability (Grilli et…
Democracy as a Fundamental Determinant of Cross-Border Merger Activity
Does democracy shape international merger activity? If so, how? The short answer is yes because democratic institutions are conducive to higher-quality corporate governance. In a new paper, we examine 104,425…
Politics and the Finance-Growth Nexus
2022 started pretty well with the acceptance (on January 2!) of my paper “Banks, Political Capital, and Growth” at the Review of Corporate Finance Studies. In this post, I’d like…
Corporate Finance Day in Rotterdam
On October 1st, the Rotterdam School of Management hosted the 18th edition of the Corporate Finance Day. I greatly enjoyed organizing this conference with my colleagues, Daniel Metzger and Peter…
Political Economy in Finance
This post reports on recent work presented at the first edition of the CEPR Conference Series on the Political Economy of Finance, which focused on the politics of regulation and…
Towards Native Digital Securities
Blockchain-based securities: New results, new perspective Security token offerings (STOs) are not initial coin offerings (ICOs) or a subset thereof. In our recent paper, “Security Token Offerings,” we show that…
The Nascent Market of Security Token Offerings
The years 2017 and 2018 saw an influx of ventures raising substantial amounts of money through initial coin offerings (ICOs). The Ethereum blockchain greatly facilitated the spectacular surge of ICOs,…