Access to digital finance: Equity crowdfunding across countries and platforms.

Financing entrepreneurship spurs innovation and economic growth. Digital financial platforms that crowdfund equity for entrepreneurs have emerged globally, yet they remain poorly understood. We model equity crowdfunding in terms of the relationship between the number of investors and the amount of money raised per pitch.

Emergency-aid for self-employed in the Covid-19 pandemic: A flash in the pan?

The self-employed faced strong income losses during the Covid-19 pandemic. Many governments introduced programs to financially support the self-employed during the pandemic, including Germany. The German Ministry for Economic Affairs announced a €50bn emergency-aid program in March 2020, offering one-off lump-sum payments of up to €15,000 to those facing substantial revenue declines.

A lasting crisis affects R&D decisions of smaller firms: the Greek experience.

We use the prolonged Greek crisis as a case study to understand how a lasting economic shock affects the innovation strategies of firms in economies with moderate innovation activities. Adopting the 3-stage CDM model, we explore the link between R&D, innovation, and productivity for different size groups of Greek manufacturing firms during the prolonged crisis. At the first stage, we find that the continuation of the crisis is harmful for the R&D engagement of smaller firms while it increased the willingness for R&D activities among the larger ones.

Economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on entrepreneurship and small businesses.

The existential threat to small businesses, based on their crucial role in the economy, is behind the plethora of scholarly studies in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining the 15 contributions of the special issue on the "Economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on entrepreneurship and small businesses," the paper comprises four parts: a systematic review of the literature on the effect on entrepreneurship and small businesses; a discussion of four literature strands based on this review; an overview of the contributions in this special issue; and some ideas for post-pandemic economic research.

COVID-19: a crisis of the female self-employed.

We investigate how the economic consequences of the pandemic and the government-mandated measures to contain its spread affect the self-employed - particularly women - in Germany. For our analysis, we use representative, real-time survey data in which respondents were asked about their situation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings indicate that among the self-employed, who generally face a higher likelihood of income losses due to COVID-19 than employees, women are about one-third more likely to experience income losses than their male counterparts.