# Thomas Lambert

> Rotterdam School of Management


## Posts

- [Governance in a Polarized World](https://thomaslambert.org/governance-in-a-polarized-world/): On October 24, 2025, the 5th edition of the Stigler Center–CEPR Conference on the Political Economy of Finance was hosted at Imperial College London. The theme, “Governance in a Polarized World,” brought together researchers exploring how polarization forces changes to private and public governance, in turn reshaping firms, markets, and institutions. Across four sessions, the papers traced a common thread: politics is no longer a backdrop to economic activity but a force that structures supply chains, consumer behavior, corporate organization, and even the narratives that bind societies together. Interestingly, the keynote of Nobel laureate Jean Tirole (Toulouse School of Economics) [&hellip;]
- [Concentration in the French Crowdfunding Market](https://thomaslambert.org/concentration-in-the-french-crowdfunding-market/): In early December 2024, the crowdfunding platform Ulule announced the acquisition of its competitor, KissKissBankBank (KKBB). This merger between the two most prominent players in the market marks a significant turning point in the French crowdfunding industry, which has been experiencing continuous growth for about a decade. Together, these platforms bring together an impressive community of 9 million people and have enabled the financing of more than 80,000 projects for a total of 480 million euros collected. Crowdfunding in France As a reminder, crowdfunding is a fundraising method that allows many people to financially support projects via online platforms. This [&hellip;]
- [Is Crowdfunding Still on the Rise?](https://thomaslambert.org/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 UK and Prosper in the US. Reward-based crowdfunding quickly followed, especially gaining traction in the arts and creative industries through platforms like Kickstarter and Ulule. Equity-based crowdfunding was slower to emerge—partly due to a lack of suitable regulatory frameworks—but is now catching up, while blockchain technology has led to intriguing developments since the late 2010s. Today, crowdfunding has become a real alternative to traditional funding sources, finding a place in [&hellip;]
- [The US Presidential Election and the Stock Market](https://thomaslambert.org/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,&nbsp;I explore why stock markets may react strongly to the election that’s still too close to call (at least at the time of writing).&nbsp;I draw insights from the surprise result in 2016, which triggered rapid market adjustments when investors reassessed their policy expectations under a Trump administration. Elections and stock prices Stock prices reflect today’s value of companies’ expected future cash flows&nbsp;(or profits, this is inaccurate but I’m simplifying). Investors buy shares in anticipation of future [&hellip;]
- [Decentralizing Bank Supervision](https://thomaslambert.org/decentralizing-supervision-new-perspectives-from-the-china-banking-regulatory-commissions-2015-reform/): 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 the optimal supervisory architecture, focused on restoring trust in the banking sector and enhancing the resilience of the financial system. In 2014, the European Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) assumed central supervision of the largest banks across the euro area, drawing on lessons learned from the GFC and the sovereign debt crisis. In a new paper, we offer new perspectives on the relationship between a supervisory architecture and micro-prudential supervision, by [&hellip;]
- [Democratizing Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Kickstarter](https://thomaslambert.org/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 jurisdictions is based on this assumption. The vital role of small businesses and high-growth entrepreneurs in growing the economy is what is usually put forth by legislators alike, from the implementation of Reg CF in May 2016 as part of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act to the EU Regulation on European Crowdfunding Service Providers (ECSP) entered into application in November 2021. But to what extent is this what [&hellip;]
- [Politics, Corporations, and the Common Good](https://thomaslambert.org/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 great lineup of scholars to discuss frontier research on the interactions between firms’ political power, their stakeholders and society at large. One of the highlights of the conference was certainly Luigis Zingales’s (Chicago Booth) keynote lecture on “Reforming Capitalism.” Acknowledging that capitalism has brought enormous prosperity in the last 150 years, his lecture emphasized significant concerns of the rising power of large corporations in recent years. He pointed out key [&hellip;]
- [Governor Appointments and Central Bank Independence](https://thomaslambert.org/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 al. 1991, Cukierman et al. 1992, Romelli 2022). However, legal or de jure independence does not necessarily translate into actual or de facto independence. Laws are incomplete, and even when the law is explicit, actual practice may deviate. Policy reforms may also give rise to a ‘seesaw effect’ – when a policy reform takes place in one dimension but the political equilibrium remains largely unchanged, politicians may try to use [&hellip;]
- [Democracy as a Fundamental Determinant of Cross-Border Merger Activity](https://thomaslambert.org/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 cross-border transactions in 58 countries from the mid-1980s and find that merger flows involve acquirers from more democratic countries than their targets. This result is primarily driven by a “pull” factor whereby firms from countries with weak democratic institutions attract cross-border deals to benefit from improved corporate governance. Setting We rely on an extensive transaction-level data set covering 58 countries between 1985 and 2018 and apply a gravity model to [&hellip;]
- [Politics and the Finance-Growth Nexus](https://thomaslambert.org/politics-and-the-finance-growth-nexus/): 2022 started pretty well with the acceptance (on January 2!) of my paper &#8220;Banks, Political Capital, and Growth&#8221; at the Review of Corporate Finance Studies. In this post, I&#8217;d like to discuss its content and also share my gratitude for having two great co-authors, Wolf Wagner and Eden Zhang. We study the consequences of banks’ political connectedness for economic activity. We focus on the subset of banks that donate to candidates in US congressional elections and exploit close election outcomes as plausible exogenous changes in banks’ political capital. We first document that aggregate shocks to banks’ political capital produce larger [&hellip;]
- [Corporate Finance Day in Rotterdam](https://thomaslambert.org/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 Roosenboom, and even more so listening to the presentations of the many excellent papers on the program (available here). There were 26 paper presentations and two keynote lectures on various issues in corporate finance, including gender, governance, M&amp;A, entrepreneurship, financial technologies, and product market. As I won’t be able to do justice to all of them, a quick overview of a few of them. A partial list of papers presented [&hellip;]
- [Political Economy in Finance](https://thomaslambert.org/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 central banking. The conference, held on February 12, 2021 and co-sponsored by three Dutch universities (Erasmus University Rotterdam, Tilburg University, University of Amsterdam), kickstarted the PolEconFin initiative (www.poleconfin.org). The PolEconFin initiative comprises of a conference series and an online platform, which gives researchers an opportunity to share their work with a community interested in research on the political economy of finance. Exploring political economy topics in finance research is still [&hellip;]
- [Towards Native Digital Securities](https://thomaslambert.org/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,”&nbsp; we show that making this distinction has important implications for the study of entrepreneurial finance where startup financing and development are the outcomes under study. Tokens – either security tokens, utility tokens, or cryptocurrencies – are digital assets that are issued on a blockchain. As their names suggest, these tokens do not all serve the same purpose. The specificity of security tokens is that they are investment products (such as stocks, bonds, funds) [&hellip;]
- [The Nascent Market of Security Token Offerings](https://thomaslambert.org/the-nascent-primary-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, even though utility tokens and cryptocurrencies are not primarily meant for raising external capital for start-up firms. Now that the ICO market bubble ebbed away security token offerings (STOs) have emerged, allowing investment in regulated securities recorded on a blockchain. Blockchain Capital paved the way with its crowd sale of equity tokens on a blockchain in April 2017. In August 2018, tZERO successfully completed the largest STO thus far, raising [&hellip;]
- [How Banks Affect Investment and Growth: New Evidence](https://thomaslambert.org/how-banks-affect-investment-and-growth-new-evidence/): Banks fulfil several key functions in the economy. They improve the allocation of scarce capital by extending credit to where it is most productive, as well as allowing households to plan their consumption over time through saving and borrowing (Allen and Gale 2000). Banks also provide liquidity to the economy by funding illiquid assets with liquid liabilities (Diamond and Dybvig 1983). By doing so, banks help savers manage their liquidity risk, while at the same time enabling long-term investment. While existing theory points to liquidity creation as a key mechanism through which a more developed banking system helps economies grow [&hellip;]
- [Crowdfunding: Funding Dynamics and Platform Growth](https://thomaslambert.org/crowdfunding-funding-dynamics-and-platform-growth/): In a recent study (available here), we examine the microeconomic underpinnings of the performance and growth of crowdfunding platforms. Our empirical exercises are conducted on Ulule and KissKissBankBank, two platforms largely dominating the French reward-based crowdfunding market. We study about 2 million contributions made by backers on these reward-based crowdfunding platforms. Why does reward-based crowdfunding matter? Reward-based crowdfunding is important to study in its own right as a sizeable channel of raising money for early startups, particularly in creativity-based industries. It also provides an excellent setting since it offers an environment in which a very large population of backers can [&hellip;]
- [Network Effects in Crowdfunding](https://thomaslambert.org/network-effects-in-crowdfunding/): The advances in FinTech are concomitant with the development of digital platforms, such as Ethereum, LendingClub, or PayPal. The decisions that users make on such platforms are highly interdependent, insofar as these decisions jointly condition the value that users will obtain from interacting on the platform. Hence, users of FinTech platforms care about participation and usage decisions of other users, which amounts to say that network effects are at work. Although observers agree on the crucial importance of network effects for FinTech platforms, there has been so far little systematic evidence of their incidence. In a recent working paper (available [&hellip;]
- [Voting Rights and Financial Systems: Evidence from Two Centuries of Suffrage Reforms](https://thomaslambert.org/voting-rights-and-financial-systems-evidence-from-two-centuries-of-suffrage-reforms/): Extending voting rights to broader segments of the population considerably affects the way countries finance their economies. This is the key finding of our new research recently published in the Economic Journal, available here. Financial systems fulfil a number of key functions in the economy, thereby contributing to its growth. By transferring funds from savers/investors to borrowers such as households and firms, financial systems are the oil for the wheels that keep the economy turning. Therefore, it is vital to have a clear understanding of the fundamental factors that support the development of financial systems. The research shows that suffrage [&hellip;]
- [Lobbying on Regulatory Enforcement Actions](https://thomaslambert.org/lobbying-on-regulatory-enforcement-actions/): A major task of financial economics and political science is to explain the raison d’être, but also the consequences, of the influence of the banking industry on the government. When the banking system fails to deliver outcomes serving the public interest, it is necessary to use regulatory actions to correct these failures. Regulatory agencies, however, are subject to agency problems and economic incentives that may serve the regulated industry at the expense of the public interest, thus resulting in regulatory capture. The forces promoting capture include career concerns, relationships, social identification, campaign contributions, and lobbying. Lobbying is one of the [&hellip;]
- [Lobbying and the Efficiency of Bank Sales](https://thomaslambert.org/lobbying-and-the-efficiency-of-bank-sales/): Bank lobbying can distort regulatory decisions by introducing private incentives into the decision-making process. Regulators are criticised for serving both their own interests, and those of the banks they regulate, at the expense of the general public (McCarty et al. 2013, Admati and Hellwig 2014). This rent-seeking may make the resolution of bank failures less efficient, and society bears the cost. But lobbying can also improve the resolution process by providing decision-makers with important information. When a bank is failing resolution process is characterised by informational asymmetries, and so information about the best way to deal with a particular case [&hellip;]
- [Lobbying on the Sale of Failed Banks](https://thomaslambert.org/lobbying-on-the-sale-of-failed-banks/): The aftermath of the financial crisis revealed failures and gaps in regulatory actions. In particular, regulators have been criticized for serving special interests—not only of the banks they regulate but also their own—rather than the interests of the general public. The resolution of failed banks in the United States is an important case in point. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is tasked with efficiently handle bank failures and, to enable it to do so, is empowered to act independently, without interference from other agencies or courts, and to use its own discretion. This raises, however, potential concerns about transparency [&hellip;]
- [The Study of Political Institutions at the Centre of Financial Economics](https://thomaslambert.org/the-study-of-political-institutions-at-the-centre-of-financial-economics/): In a recent survey of the literature on the political economy of finance (available here), we argue that understanding the evolution and functioning of financial systems cannot be fully appreciated without accounting for the critical role played by political institutions. Institutions influence economic outcomes because they shape incentives in society and persist over time. The political economy approach is based on the idea that, within the hierarchy of institutions, political institutions come first because they are more difficult to change than other institutions. In particular, they change more slowly than contracting institutions, which are the institutions governing the private contracts [&hellip;]

## Pages

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- [Home](https://thomaslambert.org/): Thomas Lambert Associate Professor of Finance Academic Director MSc in Finance and Investments Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Biography Thomas Lambert is&nbsp;Associate Professor of Finance&nbsp;and Academic Director of the MSc in Finance and Investments at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. His research interests are in Corporate Finance, Entrepreneurship, FinTech, and Political Economy. His work has been presented at major conferences around the world, including the NBER Summer Institute, AEA, EFA, SFS Cavalcade and FIRS meetings, and published in leading academic journals, including the&nbsp;Economic Journal&nbsp;and&nbsp;Management Science. He received several grants, including a Veni grant from the Dutch Research [&hellip;]


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