On Friday, April 3, 2015 CAFIN hosted the workshop “Financial Access: New Platforms for Finance.”
Digital technology has changed the way in which markets function, from collectibles to publicly-listed shares. Technology has reduced the costs of matching buyers and sellers, sharing relevant information, and executing transactions. These improvements have come about through innovative applications of technology, and complementary institutional innovations enabled by regulatory changes covering areas such as electronic communications, electronic payments and so on. The JOBS Act of 2012 is an example of regulatory change applied to equity funding rules and mechanisms.
The Center for Analytical Finance (CAFIN) at UCSC held a one-day workshop bringing together practitioners, policymakers and researchers, to assess recent developments in and prospects for creating new technology and institutional platforms for financial markets, with examples including:
- Equity crowd funding
- Online IPO auctions
- Securitized personal loans
- Non-profit finance
These new market institutions and platforms have the potential to bring down the costs of financial intermediation, improve risk sharing, and increase access to finance in ways that improve how finance fuels the real economy.
The schedule was as follows:
12-1 Introductory lunch (by invitation only)
1-3:30 Paper presentations with:
- Christine Hurt – Pricing Disintermediation: Crowdfunding and Online Auction IPOs
- Mingfeng Lin – Home Bias in Online Investments: An Empirical Study of an Online Crowdfunding Market (coauthored with Siva Viswanathan, University of Maryland)
- Richard Swart – Crowdfunding, International Economic Development and Lessons from a Pilot
- Paul Vroomen – Rates of Return in Equity Crowd Funding: An Empirical Analysis
3:30-4:00 Coffee break
4:00-5:30 Practitioner and policymaker panel with:
- Scott Alberts
- James Hardiman
- Dean (Kip) Witter III
5:30-6 Networking break
6-8 Dinner (by invitation only) and keynote talk with Michael Cagney
The workshop took place in Engineering 2, Room 499
This workshop is made possible thanks to generous support from Stephen Bruce, James K. Hutchinson, and the Dean’s Excellence Fund.