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Women’s entrepreneurial activity can significantly impact economic and social development globally, particularly in developing countries. The significant challenges entrepreneurial women face draw the attention of researchers and policymakers. This paper aims to analyse the impact of gender disparity on the likelihood of obtaining equity financing through crowdfunding. The equity crowdfunding industry was selected because it is a non-traditional financial market where gender bias may act differently for women.

To investigate the relationship between gender and equity financing through crowdfunding, this paper applies ordinary least squares regression. The analysis is based on a unique data set of 492 equity crowdfunding campaigns launched between 2013 and 2017 on all existing platforms in Brazil, Chile and Mexico.

The analysis reveals that the involvement of at least one woman on the board of firms seeking equity financing increases campaign success rates in terms of the investors’ average pledge, the target amount reached at the end of the campaign and the percentage raised at the end of the campaign exceeding the initial fundraising goal. Altogether, this suggests that equity crowdfunding campaigns should be based on gender equality in the firms’ boards. The research finds evidence that there is no gender disparity in the likelihood of a campaign being financed by a greater number of investors.

These findings have implications for Latin American female entrepreneurs when selecting funding sources and policymakers when defining political actions to remove the barriers at the root of this historic inequality in female entrepreneurs’ access to finance.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this document analyses the gender disparity in the Latin American equity crowdfunding market, shedding light on women’s access to crowdfunding financing for the first time.

This paper empirically investigates the performance of Islamic funds, which have been praised for weathering the 2008 financial storm relatively well and compares it to a European product designed to protect the most vulnerable of investors, UCITS funds.

This paper builds on 128 time-series regressions using various factor models to analyse the risk-return relationship of 242 Islamic and UCITS funds relative to a market benchmark, over a 10-year period starting January 2006, to capture severe bear and bull market conditions.

Islamic funds do not face a competitive disadvantage arising from their strict compliance with Sharīʿah principles, and their performance and investment style is relatively similar to UCITS schemes.

Islamic funds represent a low risk investment due to their very mild betas. Therefore, when forming part of a diversified portfolio, they can act as a hedging tool against adverse market movements.

Muslim investors are not punished relative to conventional retail investors when following their own beliefs. Other investors can consider Islamic funds in their portfolio allocation, especially those who seek socially and ethically responsible investments.

This paper fills a lacuna in the existing literature, because the sample is made up of Islamic funds established worldwide and includes not only equity, but also fixed income and mixed allocation funds.

This paper aims to contribute to the scientific debate concerning the impact of equity crowdfunding on the performance of crowdfunded firms after campaigning. To this aim, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the characteristics of the campaign and the subsequent firm innovativeness.

This study adopts a quantitative research approach to evaluate if the entrepreneurial choices affecting the characteristics of the equity crowdfunding campaigns have an impact on the post-campaign firm innovativeness.

The results of the models show that the campaign characteristics have a direct impact on the firm innovativeness, both in terms of offering and communication and the campaign performance.

This paper presents one of the first studies to investigate the relationship between the choice of campaign characteristics and the post-campaign firm innovativeness. As such, the study contributes to both the literature concerning start-up innovation and the literature about the impact of equity crowdfunding.

The study assess the selection ability and market timing skills of mutual fund and unit trust managers in Ghana.

The study uses an improved survivorship bias-free dataset of yearly after-fee returns of all mutual funds and unit trusts operating in Ghana from January 2011 to December 2019, cumulating in nine years of quantitative fund data. The authors assess Mutual funds and Unit trusts that ever existed, “alive” or “dead,” over the sample period in the study. The authors construct factor loadings to enable the application of multifactor models in the analysis. The authors apply the unconditional versions of the Jensen alpha, Fama-French three-factor, and Carhart four-factor models to determine the selection ability and market timing skills of 32 mutual funds and 17 unit trusts. The authors deploy HAC-consistent robust standard errors to the OLS estimations to subdue the effect of heterogeneity and autocorrelation.

The results indicate that, on average, mutual funds and unit trust managers possess market timing skills but no selection ability. When the results are decomposed into fund types, fixed-income and balanced mutual fund managers possess selection ability and market timing skills.

To the authors' best knowledge, this study is the earliest to examine the selection ability and market timing skills of both mutual fund and unit trust managers in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It is also the earliest to construct factor loadings for the Ghana stock market.

This paper examines the inflation hedging performance separated into expected and unexpected inflation in Korean equity funds. In particular, using the bootstrap approach, we identify whether the inflation hedging performance is based on skill or luck. We use the equity funds of the average net asset value (NAV) over 5 billion Korean won and over the 80% stock position. The sample data cover the period from January 2002 to March 2015. The main findings are as follows. First, most equity funds demonstrate a hedging performance against the unexpected inflation shock and this hedging performance seems to come from the fund manager’s skill. Second, our findings are robust across the sieve bootstrap results for the serial dependence and heteroscedasticity. Third, the equity funds have slightly different inflation hedging performances depending on their investment style. Among the investment styles, small-cap, growth, or small and growth style funds demonstrate more hedging performance against unexpected inflation shock. This hedging performance seems to come from the fund manager’s skill. Finally, in the case of the funds separated by winner and loser, the winner funds have more hedging performance for unexpected inflation shock than the loser funds.

This study aims to establish the shape of investment dynamics in equity crowdfunding to better understand backer behavior.

This study provides insights into when backers invest in successful funding campaigns. It uses t-tests to compare differences in means between observation windows during successful funding campaigns. It is based on 4,938 transactions from 61 campaigns, focusing on the first and last tail ends.

In contrast to previous findings, the current investment dynamics seem more U-shaped than L-shaped. This supports previous findings about a strong start but also suggests a late collective attention effect. The strength is higher at the first tail end. However, differences in the later tail ends are statistically significant and emphasize the presence of late investment activities, especially in crowded or less complex campaigns.

These findings emphasize the importance of signaling during the entire funding window. This encourages platforms to invest in user-friendly functionalities that guide entrepreneurs and help backers when investing in successful campaigns.

This study improves the understanding of backer behavior and suggests changing investment dynamics in equity crowdfunding. In addition, this pattern contrasts with previous findings on dynamic collective attention effects in rich digitally informative markets, implying two attention effects when uncertainty is high.

Using overlapped portfolio data on public equity funds in Korea, the authors construct several types of fund-stock weighted bipartite networks and measure fund network centrality. The authors also examine the relationship between network centrality and fund investment performance. The authors' results are three-fold. First, the authors find that the fund centrality of the network in which funds and stocks are connected based on the most active investing behavior positively affects the fund performance. Second, the funds with a high centrality level based on the same network generate higher returns by holding stocks with high value uncertainty. Third, the authors find that fund centrality is not associated with herd behavior. Based on these results, the authors argue that fund centrality is a proxy of information advantage and skill of fund managers. The authors' paper shows that network analysis could be a new way to identify funds with better performance and measure the skill and information advantage to construct an optimal portfolio.

This study investigates the performance distribution of passive funds in the Korean market and compares it with the performance distribution of active funds. The key findings are as follows, first, the performance distribution of passive funds has a thicker tail compared to that of active funds. There are passive funds that achieve outstanding performance, and both the false discovery rate (FDR) analysis and simulation analysis suggest that their outperformance is driven by managerial skill rather than luck. Second, passive fund performance is more persistent compared to active fund performance. Third, investors are less responsive to passive fund performance compared to active fund performance. The fund flow-performance relationship is significantly positive for active funds but not for passive funds. This implies that investors may not recognize the managerial skills of passive funds.

Crowdfunding has become one of the preferred mechanisms to raise funds by startups and small entrepreneurs. As such, this paper aims to develop an appropriate framework for Sharīʿah-compliant equity-based crowdfunding (SEC) for entrepreneurship development in Malaysia.

The research begins by analyzing the intention of 200 entrepreneurs in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor regarding the use of crowdfunding to raise capital. The analysis is based on the theory of reasoned action (TRA), which is also associated with the technology acceptance model (TAM) and is effected by using structural equation modeling (SEM).

The entrepreneurs agree on the ease of use of crowdfunding in raising capital, although it appeared that they are quite reluctant to share their business ideas online. Subsequently, an SEC framework is proposed, to further enhance entrepreneurship development in Malaysia particularly in meeting the need for raising funds in line with Sharīʿah (Islamic law) principles.

This paper aims to contribute more to the development of a blueprint for an SEC platform for market players and regulators in Malaysia.

This paper also aims to highlight the growing needs of entrepreneurs, particularly in Malaysia to have a Sharīʿah-compliant alternative to raise funds via crowdfunding.

This paper makes two main contributions. First, it provides evidence on Malaysian entrepreneurs’ intention to use crowdfunding for fundraising through TAM and SEM analysis. Second, it proposes an SEC framework for the development of entrepreneurs in Malaysia.

A network of partners helps and assists a crowdfunding platform (CFP) in scouting, assessing and selecting projects. This cooperation increases the number of successful projects by attracting a sizable number of investors, proponents and attracting marginal investors when a campaign falls short of the threshold for success. This study examines the role of partner networks in a platform ecosystem, specifically in terms of number of different partners and their diversity in the performance of the crowdfunding campaign.

Using logistic and linear regressions, we analyze a sample of 233 projects, both funded and not funded, launched by 10 Italian equity CFPs between 2014 and 2018.

Our findings indicate that the variety of partners in a platform's network influence the probability of campaign success and how much capital the proponent company raises. CFPs are resource-constrained new ventures, and a network with a wider variety of partners ensures the strategic resources and competencies that are required in an early stage market, thus facilitating campaign funding.

The variety of partner networks could help CFPs to offer unique and strategic value propositions and define the competitive positioning of platforms.

This study provides a deeper understanding of the determinants of equity crowdfunding campaign performance by emphasizing the role of CFP's network of partners on the entire crowdfunding ecosystem and its underlying organizational elements.