Seminar: Rewards-based crowdfunding as an institutional carrier: Cross-border investments in environmental projects

To date, we lack theoretical and empirical insights on how money flows across borders in rewards-based crowdfunding. We invoke an institutional logics perspective, suggesting that a community logic prevails in rewards-based crowdfunding and that it serves as an institu-tional carrier. Specifically, we hypothesize that environmental projects are more likely to attract cross-border funding from backers in countries with well-developed institutions than non-environmental projects. This effect will be stronger when environ-mental projects are located in countries with weakly-developed institutions. Using data from 290,126 Kickstarter campaigns located in 139 countries with backers spanning the globe, we find support for our hypotheses. Our findings challenge commonly-held assumptions on cross-border money flows in extant literature that examines traditional investors or big corporations, who usually hold a market logic.