Christian Fisch

• Prof. Dr.
• Professor for Business Economics and Entrepreneurship at University of Luxembourg

In an initial coin offering (ICO), new ventures raise capital by selling tokens to a crowd of in-vestors. Often, this token is a cryptocurrency, a digital medium of value exchange based on the distributed ledger technology. Both the number of ICOs and the amount of capital raised have exploded since 2017. Despite attracting significant attention fr...

Research on initial coin offerings (ICOs) is nascent and assesses ICOs from the perspectives of ventures and regulators. Little is known about the equally important group of investors who provide their capital to ventures in ICOs. Using a primary dataset of 517 ICO investors, we identify and categorize the motivations to invest in ICOs using factor...

Biodiversity loss is widespread and accelerating, threatening ecological systems and human well-being. Entrepreneurship and biodiversity loss are intertwined: entrepreneurs—especially in the primary sector—are both causing and suffering from this loss in biodiversity. However, little is known about the biodiversity-entrepreneurship nexus, in partic...

The B Corp certification is a prominent voluntary standard for evaluating ventures' commitments to governance, social justice, and environmental sustainability, reflecting a growing shift toward transparent and accountable business practices. Despite increasing scholarly interest, existing research on B Corp certification remains fragmented across...

The B Corp certification is the outcome of a voluntary third-party certification process and attests that a venture adheres to certain social and environmental standards. Using propensity score matching on a global dataset of 1,231 B Corp certified ventures and 1,231 comparable non-certified ventures, we examine how an initial B Corp certification...

The role of violent conflict for entrepreneurial activity is relatively underexplored and controversial in the entrepreneurship literature. Drawing on institutional theory, a country's level of conflict should reduce individuals' propensities to engage in entrepreneurship and shift the relative share of activity from opportunity to necessity entrep...

Occupational outcomes like entrepreneurship are generally considered personal information that individuals should have the autonomy to disclose. With the advancing capability of artificial intelligence (AI) to infer private details from widely available human-centric data, such as social media, it is crucial to investigate whether AI can accurately...

Occupational outcomes like entrepreneurship are generally considered personal information that individuals should have the autonomy to disclose. With the advancing capability of artificial intelligence (AI) to infer private details from widely available human-centric data, such as social media, it is crucial to investigate whether AI can accurately...

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 i...

Personality traits can determine business angels’ decision to engage in syndication (i.e., co-investing with other investors). We conduct a quasi-random replication of Block et al. (J Bank Finance 100:306–327, 2019), who document an influence of the Big 5 personality traits on syndication. We employ a machine learning-based approach to operationali...

The field of entrepreneurship has seen remarkable growth, increasing the expectations of academic audiences. Articles need to balance novelty with rigorous methodology, theoretical contributions, social implications, and coherent argumentation to succeed in the publication process. However, navigating these varied and sometimes conflicting expectat...

The EIF Private Equity Mid-Market Survey and the EIF Venture Capital Survey (the largest combined regular survey exercises among General Partners on a pan-European level) provide an opportunity to retrieve unique market insights. This publication is based on the results of the 2023 EIF Private Equity Mid-Market Survey, conducted by the EIF. The pap...

The psychological attributes of business angels are an important but understudied determinant of business angels’ investment behaviour. We derive hypotheses on how psychological attributes (i.e. clout, risk‐taking, analytical thinking) affect business angels’ investments in successful portfolio ventures. Our theorized mechanisms draw on cognitive b...

The EIF VC Survey and the EIF Private Equity Mid-Market Survey (the largest combined regular survey exercises among General Partners on a pan-European level) provide an opportunity to retrieve unique market insights. This publication is based on the results of the 2023 VC Survey, conducted by the EIF with the support of Invest Europe. The paper foc...

An entrepreneur’s digital identity matters for resource acquisition and venture development. However, we know little about the factors that influence or change entrepreneurs’ digital identities. This study explores how entrepreneurs’ digital identities change after a venture capital (VC) funding round. Applying a language-based text analysis to a l...

With the global rise of impact investments to achieve societal goals, an increasing number of new ventures that aim to create societal impact now seek to go public. However, while many conceptual studies suggest that impact investors are less likely to pursue financially oriented exit plans in exchange for generating societal impact, there is littl...

The first-ever article published in Research Policy was Casimir’s (1971) advocacy of academic freedom in light of the industry’s increasing influence on research in universities. Half a century later, the literature attests to the dearth of work on the role of academic freedom for innovation. To fill this gap, we employ instrumental variable techni...

Technostress is an important by-product of information and communication technologies (ICT). The technostress literature suggests focusing on specific dimensions of technostress, such as techno-overload, which describes when ICT usage demands to work faster and longer. However, only a few studies have dealt with the technostress of small business o...

The first-ever article published in Research Policy was Casimir’s (1971) advocacy of academic freedom in light of the industry’s increasing influence on research in universities. Half a century later, the literature attests to the dearth of work on the role of academic freedom for innovation. To fill this gap, we employ instrumental variable techni...

Schumpeterian entrepreneurs are considered agents of innovation and technology transfer. However, to fulfill this role, they need entrepreneurial finance. From the perspective of digital identity, we examine the relationship between a Schumpeterian digital identity and venture capital (VC) funding. Because the VC industry celebrates innovative and...

We assess the impact of monetary policy (i.e., central bank interest rates) on the activity of venture capitalists (VC). Using data from 31 countries from 2004 to 2019, we find that VC firms’ fundraising activity increases when interest rates become negative. We explain this finding by referring to the principal-agent relationship between general a...

We study the case of Vietnam to assess the long-lasting role of institutional and historical legacy on entrepreneurial outcomes. In particular, we investigate the detrimental effect of socialist institutions on entrepreneurship. Vietnam offers a unique quasi-experimental setting because the country was divided into the socialist North and the nonso...

Trademarks differ in breadth and can cover a wide range of categories of goods and services. We draw on real options theory and argue that greater trademark breadth constitutes a valuable real option that is associated with higher firm valuation and performance. We analyze a sample of 1510 firms that went public in Europe between 2002 and 2015 and...

Blockchain technology and smart contracts are catalysts for decentralization and disintermediation. These new technologies reduce transaction costs, agency costs, and offer a basis for trustless social and economic interactions. They are fueling new business models for decentralized platforms and have revolutionized crowdfunding. A recent trend, De...

Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are intensively shaping businesses and the economy as a whole, and AI-related research is exploding in many domains of business and management research. In contrast, AI has received relatively little attention within the domain of entrepreneurship research, while many entrepreneurship scholars agree that AI...

Blockchain-based tokens are widely acknowledged as a new asset class. Tokens allow new ventures to raise financing from crowd-investors on public blockchains. The information stored on these public ledgers makes it possible to examine the crowd’s investment behavior, as well as the financial returns to individual investors in the cross-section of t...

Replication studies are important for the empirical research process. Yet, while there is an increased awareness of the need for replication in management research, it appears that such studies are rarely published in leading management journals. Importantly, we lack a comprehensive overview of replication studies in the top management journals tha...

Blockchain technology and smart contracts are catalysts for decentralization anddisintermediation. These new technologies reduce transaction costs, agency, and offer a basis for trustless social and economic interactions. They are fueling new business models for de-centralized platforms and have revolutionized crowdfunding. A recent trend, Decentra...

Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs) are blockchain-enabled cryptographic assets that represent proof-of-ownership for digital objects. The use of NFTs has been pioneered by creative indus-try entrepreneurs who have sought to generate new revenue streams and modes of stakehold-er engagement. Despite rapid growth in popularity, concerns have been raised aroun...

Bootstrap financing refers to measures that entrepreneurial ventures undertake to preserve liquidity (e.g., reducing expenses, collecting receivables, delaying payments, preselling). Prior research shows that bootstrap financing is an important enabler for the growth of resource-constrained early-stage ventures. However, little is known about the u...

The COVID-19 crisis presents manifest threats for entrepreneurs since their business survival is often directly at stake given the alarming economic downturn. This existential threat, together with their crucial role in the economy, is the reason for the plethora of public financial support schemes being implemented throughout the entire world. How...

We assess whether and how VC investors’ education and experience influence their screening decisions of potential investee candidates. Empirically, we perform an experimental choice-based-conjoint (CBC) analysis with 564 individual VC investors. Our results highlight that the level and field of education, as well as the decision maker’s investment...

Research summary We apply insights from research in social psychology and labor economics to the domain of entrepreneurial finance and investigate how founder chief executive officers’ (founder CEOs’) facial attractiveness influences firm valuation. Leveraging the novel context of initial coin offerings (ICOs), we document a pronounced founder CEO...

We apply insights from research in social psychology and labor economics to the domain of entrepreneurial finance and investigate how founder chief executive officers’ (founder CEOs’) facial attractiveness influences firm valuation. Leveraging the novel context of initial coin offerings (ICOs), we document a pronounced founder CEO beauty premium, w...

We examine the association between several behavioral and electrophysiological indices of impulsivity-related constructs and multiple entrepreneurial constructs. Specifically, we investigate if these behavioral and electrophysiological measures are more useful as predictors of entrepreneurship than self-reported measures of impulsivity. Our finding...

Plain English Summary A new study, investigating 130 countries, finds that COVID-19 influenced the global venture capital landscape in surprising ways. We assess the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on venture capital (VC) investments, documenting a significant decline in investments using a dataset of 39,527 funding rounds occurring before and duri...

Decision-making research in venture capital (VC) tends to study investors solely in particular countries or regions and lacks studies that directly compare the importance of screening criteria from different regions. We use a multimethod approach to investigate differences in the importance attributed to several screening criteria between United St...

We investigate how individual factors moderate the impact of bankruptcy exemption levels—that is, the amount of wealth individuals can keep in case of bankruptcy—on entry into self-employment. Conceptually, we combine Prospect Theory’s axiom of diminishing sensitivity with insights from research on entrepreneurial failure. We hypothesize that indiv...

Initial coin offerings (ICOs) represent an innovative and new funding mechanism for new technology ventures. In our comprehensive review of the industry’s evolution, we show that despite its short history, there have been dramatic changes and shifts in the number of ICOs, the amount of money raised, the geographic distribution of ICOs, and their re...

We assess the impact of negative central bank interest rates on venture capital (VC) markets. Using data from 32 countries from 2004 to 2019, we find that interest rates have a significant effect on the functioning of VC markets. Higher interest rates are associated with higher demand for venture capital by entrepreneurs and higher fundraising acti...

Regional science has long been concerned with measuring the spatial distribution of innovation activity. We introduce trademarks as a new indicator for regional innovation and argue that they are particularly useful to measure the 'soft' side of innovation that is difficult to capture with conventional indicators. We explore the spatial distributio...

We apply insights from research insocial psychology and labor economics to the domain ofentrepreneurial finance and investigate how founder chiefexecutive officers' (founder CEOs') facial attractivenessinfluences firm valuation. Leveraging the novel context ofinitial coin offerings (ICOs), we document a pronouncedfounder CEO beauty premium, with a...

Impact investors pursue both financial and social goals and have become an important source of funding for social enterprises. Our study assesses impact investor criteria when screening social enterprises. Applying an experimental conjoint analysis to a sample of 179 impact investors, we find that the three most important criteria are the authentic...

Initial coin offerings (ICOs) are one of the major innovations that characterize the digital revolution of financial markets. Among the expectations created by the digital revolution is the democratization of entrepreneurial finance, defined in terms of the creation of more equality regarding the access to financial resources by categories known to...

Initial coin offerings (ICOs) represent an innovative and new funding mechanism for new technology ventures. In our comprehensive review of the industry's evolution, we show that despite its short history, there have been dramatic changes and shifts in the number of ICOs, the amount of money raised, the geographic distribution of ICOs, and their re...

Initial coin offerings (ICOs) are one of the major innovations that characterize the digital revolution of financial markets. Among the expectations created by the digital revolution is the democratization of entrepreneurial finance, defined in terms of the creation of more equality regarding the access to financial resources by categories known to...

Building on organisational failure learning and upper echelons theory, we examine the link between top management team (TMT) prior experiences and invention failure learning among research organisations. Specifically, we develop theoretical arguments to suggest that TMT founding experience and exposure to US culture facilitate organisational learni...

We examine the role of institutional investors in initial coin offerings (ICOs). Taking a financial investor's perspective, we assess the determinants of post-ICO performance via buy-and-hold abnormal returns (BHAR) in a sample of 565 ICO ventures. Conceptually, we argue that institutional investors' superior screening (selection effect) and coachi...

Bootstrap financing refers to measures that entrepreneurial ventures undertake to preserve liquidity (e.g., reducing expenses, collecting receivables, delaying payments, preselling). Prior research shows that bootstrap financing is an important enabler for the growth of resource-constrained early-stage ventures. However, little is known about the u...

We assess whether and how entrepreneurs' digital identities change in response to entrepreneurial failure based on a sample of 760 entrepreneurs who experienced failure. We analyze a longitudinal dataset of Twitter messages before, during, and after a business failure with a language-based method of computerized text analysis. The results of our ex...

We examine the role of institutional investors in initial coin offerings (ICOs). Taking a financial investor’s perspective, we assess the determinants of post-ICO performance via buy-and-hold abnormal returns in a sample of 565 ICO ventures. Conceptually, we argue that institutional investors’ superior screening (selection effect) and coaching abil...

We analyze the distribution of venture capital (VC) investments across German regions and explore the geographical determinants of these investments. So far, little is known about the regional determinants of governmental (GVC), independent (IVC), and corporate (CVC) VC firms and about whether these types of VC firms invest in different regions. Co...

We apply insights from research in social psychology and labor economicsto the domain of entrepreneurial finance and investigate how founder chief executive officers’ (founder CEOs’) facial attractiveness influences firm valuation. Leveraging the novel context ofinitial coin offerings (ICOs), we document a pronounced founder CEO beauty premium, wit...

Research concerning religion and entrepreneurship has greatly increased over the last years and is scattered across various academic disciplines and fields. To provide an overview, we conduct a systematic literature search leading to a descriptive overview of the field based on 270 articles published in 163 journals. We identify and characterize th...

Family firms must attract talented employees to stay competitive. They have different employer characteristics than non-family firms. For example, although they generally offer lower wages, they also typically offer higher job security and a more cooperative and entrepreneurial work environment. However, drawing on occupational choice theory, we ar...

Regional science has long been concerned with measuring the spatial distribution of innovation activity. While patents are frequently used as an indicator of regional innovation, we introduce trademarks as an additional indicator. Specifically, we explore the spatial distribution of trademark applications using a detailed and comprehensive dataset...

Purpose Prior research has investigated the development of Islamic communities. The authors contribute to this line of research by analyzing the effects of Islamic values and Islamic religious practices on entrepreneurship intentions in Islamic communities. Using theory of planned behavior as a theoretical lens, they also take into account that the...

Research on initial coin offerings (ICOs) is nascent and assesses ICOs from the perspectives of ventures and regulators. Little is known about the equally important group of investors who provide their capital to ventures in ICOs. Using a primary dataset of 517 ICO investors, we identify and categorize the motivations to invest in ICOs using factor...

Purpose: Prior research has investigated the development of Islamic communities. We contribute to this line of research by analyzing the effects of Islamic values and Islamic religious practices on entrepreneurship intentions in Islamic communities. Using theory of planned behavior as a theoretical lens, we also take into account that the relations...

We use an experimental conjoint analysis to investigate the investment criteria of 749 private equity investors, distinguishing between family offices, business angels, venture capital funds, growth equity funds, and leveraged buyout funds. Our results indicate that revenue growth is the most important investment criterion, followed by the value-ad...

Acquisitions by Chinese firms have increased markedly in recent years. So far, we know little about the effects of these acquisitions on the acquirer’s innovation performance. Our paper focuses on two interrelated research questions. First, to what extent can Chinese firms increase their patent output following an acquisition? Second, which factors...

After the successful ENTFIN conferences in Lyon (2016), Ghent (2017), and Milan (2018), the ENT FIN Association and the FGF e. V. will organize the fourth conference on Entrepreneurial Finance in the historical city of Trier, Germany on July 2-3, 2019. Authors interested in presenting their paper at the conference should submit the full paper in a...

Little is known about the role of venture capital (VC) in the financing of blockchain technol-ogy-based firms (BTBFs). We assess BTBF post-ICO performance in terms of growth, utilization, and profits and employ econometric methods to control for the endogeneity inherent inVC financing. Our results suggest that VC financing causes BTBFs to substanti...

The decision to syndicate investments in entrepreneurial finance has been explained through financial, networking, and resource-based perspectives. We posit that a personality perspective exists next to these three perspectives and hypothesize that the personality of business angels influences syndication behavior. Using data from 3,234 syndication...

The idea that start-ups and young firms (hereafter entrepreneurial firms) create jobs is very popular among policy-makers and has led to a large number of studies investigating the effect of entrepreneurship on job creation. Recently, however, society and many players in the political arena have begun to care not only about job quantity and quantit...

Societies around the globe respond to the contemporary technological and economic change by defining entrepreneurship and innovation as core principles for future competitive advantage. Does this rise of the "entrepreneurial society" also imply that entrepreneurial personalities are becoming increasingly widespread and powerful in political leaders...

This study analyzes the effects of regional- and firm-level factors on the intellectual property (IP) output of high-tech firms. So far, little is known on how regional factors influence the IP output of high-tech firms. We combine data on 8317 German high-tech firms with regional data and perform various regression analyses. We measure the IP outp...

Family firms need to attract talented non-family employees to stay competitive. We argue that the role of the image of family firms as employers and the preference to work in family firms depend on the specific labor market context. Using a multi-level, cross-country dataset of 12,150 individuals in 40 countries, we find that hiring and firing prac...

Research indicates that individuals’ digital footprints, for example in Twitter and Facebook, can reveal remarkably valid information about their personality characteristics. In this study, we use digital footprints to gain insights into the personality of superstar entrepreneurs and managers, a largely understudied population in entrepreneurship r...

China has been experiencing a substantial growth in patent applications. But is this increase accompanied by a similar increase in patent value? To assess this question, we examine the citation lag of Chinese patents as a proxy of patent value in comparison with patents from the US, Europe, Japan, and Korea. Our empirical analysis comprises a uniqu...

Intellectual property rights (IPRs) play a very important role for innovations. They serve as a mechanism for innovators (e.g., individuals, companies, universities) to protect their intellectual property and enable the holder of the IPR to profit from the innovation. Patents and trademarks constitute the two most important and most frequently util...

We analyse the initial IP applications of 4,703 start-ups in the U.S., distinguishing between trademark and patent applications. Our empirical results show that start-ups are more likely to file for trademarks instead of patents when entering markets with a higher market concentration. Furthermore, we find that start-ups that are primarily active i...

Innovative entrepreneurship is considered an important pillar for economic development and has sparked a lively discussion in academia and practice alike. Oftentimes, however, the debate is not sufficiently grounded on solid empirical evidence. The academic literature is growing but very scattered and is separated into several disciplines. We provi...