The role of crowdfunding in promoting entrepreneurship

Crowdfunding is a collaborative initiative, usually via internet, where people network to collectively raise funds in order to invest in and support projects delivered by other people or organizations. Tools such as crowdfunding are born and thrive in a grassroots environment, with a strong potential to positively disrupt the entrepreneurial generation setting and grow to a position of significant relevance in society, namely at a time when alternatives to traditional forms of finance are welcome and the technology to deliver them is abundant. Entrepreneurship is the act of transforming ideas and projects into economic products or services. Entrepreneurship related to starting new businesses is better known as start‐up ventures. Entrepreneurs face a series of challenges, from idea conception and business plan design, to obtaining finance, promoting new products and services, generating revenues and profits and generally growing and sustaining a business for the long‐run. These challenges can be overwhelming, namely in the start‐up phase of a new venture, leaving several ideas on paper without them having a chance to “grow legs and walk”. This paper and its analysis offer important insights about the contribution of crowdfunding to facilitate the attainment of critical factors for successful entrepreneurship. With extensive use of real practical examples, leveraging previous analytical studies of other crowdfunding implications and reviewing expert literature, by interviewing entrepreneurs, crowdfunding platform owners and by benefitting from hands on experience of working in such an organization, we intend to clarify the impact of crowdfunding in what we considered to be 7 key entrepreneurial requirements detailed further in the introduction section and later in the body of the paper. The findings have implications for entrepreneurs, naturally, and for business generation theory, extending current entrepreneurial guidelines with innovative tools and methodologies capable of sustaining successful ventures in a newly highlighted cooperative world. We live in innovative times where the channels for the transfer of funds and resources suffer disruptive changes with the potential to significantly improve the ability to generate new initiatives for the well‐being of entrepreneurs and all related communities.

The impact of banks dimension on profitability, sustainability and efficiency: An analysis for the Iberian financial system

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

The new economy: Essays in network economics and two-sided markets

Following the Introduction, which surveys existing literature on the technology advances and regulation in telecommunications and on two-sided markets, we address specific issues on the industries of the New Economy, featured by the existence of network effects. We seek to explore how each one of these industries work, identify potential market failures and find new solutions at the economic regulation level promoting social welfare. In Chapter 1 we analyze a regulatory issue on access prices and investments in the telecommunications market. The existing literature on access prices and investment has pointed out that networks underinvest under a regime of mandatory access provision with a fixed access price per end-user. We propose a new access pricing rule, the indexation approach, i.e., the access price, per end-user, that network i pays to network j is function of the investment levels set by both networks. We show that the indexation can enhance economic efficiency beyond what is achieved with a fixed access price. In particular, access price indexation can simultaneously induce lower retail prices and higher investment and social welfare as compared to a fixed access pricing or a regulatory holidays regime. Furthermore, we provide sufficient conditions under which the indexation can implement the socially optimal investment or the Ramsey solution, which would be impossible to obtain under fixed access pricing. Our results contradict the notion that investment efficiency must be sacrificed for gains in pricing efficiency. In Chapter 2 we investigate the effect of regulations that limit advertising airtime on advertising quality and on social welfare. We show, first, that advertising time regulation may reduce the average quality of advertising broadcast on TV networks. Second, an advertising cap may reduce media platforms and firms' profits, while the net effect on viewers (subscribers) welfare is ambiguous because the ad quality reduction resulting from a regulatory cap o¤sets the subscribers direct gain from watching fewer ads. We find that if subscribers are sufficiently sensitive to ad quality, i.e., the ad quality reduction outweighs the direct effect of the cap, a cap may reduce social welfare. The welfare results suggest that a regulatory authority that is trying to increase welfare via regulation of the volume of advertising on TV might necessitate to also regulate advertising quality or, if regulating quality proves impractical, take the effect of advertising quality into consideration. 3 In Chapter 3 we investigate the rules that govern Electronic Payment Networks (EPNs). In EPNs the No-Surcharge Rule (NSR) requires that merchants charge at most the same amount for a payment card transaction as for cash. In this chapter, we analyze a three- party model (consumers, merchants, and a proprietary EPN) with endogenous transaction volumes and heterogenous merchants' transactional benefits of accepting cards to assess the welfare impacts of the NSR. We show that, if merchants are local monopolists and the network externalities from merchants to cardholders are sufficiently strong, with the exception of the EPN, all agents will be worse o¤ with the NSR, and therefore the NSR is socially undesirable. The positive role of the NSR in terms of improvement of retail price efficiency for cardholders is also highlighted.

Drivers of revenues and expenses in higher-education non-profit institutions

Double Degree