Crowdfunding to overcome the immigrant entrepreneurs’ liability of outsidership: the role of internal social capital

This paper examines the role of internal social capital on the composition of the crowd of backers attracted by US-born vis a vis immigrant entrepreneurs. Our estimates are based on an original dataset of 2,231 Kickstarter campaigns and show that immigrant entrepreneurs attract comparatively fewer backers located in the host country but receive more contributions from backers located in other countries. Overall, this allows immigrant entrepreneurs to achieve a fundraising performance similar to that of local-born entrepreneurs. We show that entrepreneurs’ social capital developed within the reward-based crowdfunding platform positively moderates the previous relationships.