Hans Rawhouser (Management, Entrepreneurship and Technology) and Erin Hamilton (Accounting), along with Michael Cummings (University of Arkansas) and Silvio Vismara (University of Bergamo) recently had a paper, "An Equity Crowdfunding Research Agenda: Evidence from Stakeholder Participation in the Rulemaking Process" accepted at a top entrepreneurship journal, Small Business Economics. Equity crowdfunding is a new form of entrepreneurial finance that opens up investment in for-profit private companies to typical investors, which was previously only possible for high-income, high net-worth investors. Equity crowdfunding, still in its infancy, may create many opportunities and risks for both entrepreneurs and investors. The paper reviews and qualitatively analyzes a large corpus of 540 public comments submitted by stakeholders in response to new U.S. equity crowdfunding regulations. Through a qualitative content analytic approach, the paper establishes a taxonomy for understanding the opportunities and risks afforded by equity crowdfunding and identifies fruitful research directions in this emerging domain.
