Crowdfunding and regional entrepreneurial investment: an application of the CrowdBerkeley database

Crowdfunding platforms enable individuals to solicit small investments, donations, or loans over the Internet from a wide variety of funders; they have emerged as a new and potentially important source of funds for entrepreneurial and philanthropic initiatives. We build and present three databases for public use, including Kickstarter, Kiva, and CrowdRise, and link regional measures of Kickstarter to entrepreneurial ventures listed in Crunchbase. We find that Kickstarter projects in a region correlate with increased angel investing activity, even after instrumenting with projects that should not be of interest to investors. The paper describes scraping tools, database schema, descriptive statistics, dashboards, access for research and policy use, and general reflections on building open databases for the research community.