Academic freedom and innovation.

Academic freedom is a critical norm of science. Despite the widely postulated importance of academic freedom, the literature attests to a dearth of research on the topic. Specifically, we know little about how academic freedom relates to indicators of societal progress, such as innovation. We address this research gap by empirically assessing the impact of academic freedom on the quantity (patent applications) and quality (patent citations) of innovation output using a comprehensive sample of 157 countries over the 1900-2015 period. We find that improving academic freedom by one standard deviation increases patent applications by 41% and forward citations by 29%. The results are robust across a range of different specifications. Our findings constitute an alarming plea to policymakers: global academic freedom has declined over the past decade for the first time in the last century and our estimates suggest that this decline poses a substantial threat to the innovation output of countries in terms of both quantity and quality.

Expanding corporate finance perspectives to equity crowdfunding.

In equity crowdfunding, firms raise capital online from a large pool of heterogeneous investors, thereby providing primary market opportunities similar to traditional public markets, such as initial public offerings. The development of secondary markets is instead still limited, making the post-offering perspectives of both crowdfunding investors and firms closer to private equity deals. We believe that equity crowdfunding markets provide an interesting setting where to test existing corporate finance and financial economics theories, as well as to develop new theoretical insights. Relatedly, our understanding of crowdfunding mechanisms can largely benefit from increased attention from finance scholars. This paper and special issue are an attempt in this direction.