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The authors evaluate the preferences of retail investors with regard to the investment in structured financial products. The purpose of the paper is an analysis of the relative importance of key product attributes namely the issuing bank, the product structure, the associated costs and the disclosed risk.

The authors conduct a choice-based conjoint analysis, based on an online experiment. Participants judge their preferences for products which are presented by shortened key information documents according to the requirements of EU regulation.

Investors consider the costs and the product structure to be most important, whereas the issuer and information on risk are of less interest. Their preferences depend on their (self-evaluated) expertise: while inexperienced retail investors concentrate on costs, experienced investors pay more attention to the product structure.

The study is limited to a subsegment of the market, the discount certificates. For these products, issuing banks gain insight into the attractiveness of their products. Furthermore, the study carries implications for regulators: since investors emphasize the costs in their decisions, an unbiased disclosure of costs should be enforced.

While the recent literature has studied preferences for the investment in mutual funds, this is the first paper which directly analyzes the drivers of an investment in structured retail products.

There is still an ongoing debate on the value relevance of capital structure and its determinants. Recently the issue has been explored in family firms after being explored in mature firms. This paper investigates the role of institutional investors and the firm's innovation activity in influencing the firm's decision and ability to acquire debt capital.

A large sample of 700 privately-held family firms in Italy from 2010 to 2019. Two analysis techniques are used: panel analysis and path analysis. The value of debt and the debt ratio are used as leverage measures. The value of patent (as a proxy for innovation) and institutional investor are the explanatory variables.

The results show that institutional investors have no relationship with financial leverage measures except when controlling for an interaction variable (Institutional investors × Lombardy region). The patent value is positively correlated with debt; however, the ratio patent-to-asset is negatively related to financial leverage indicating higher risk exposure. The nonlinearity test demonstrates a turning point when the relationship between patent value and debt inverts.

Firms should monitor their innovation activity since excessive innovation increases risk exposure and affects financing opportunities and value. The involvement of institutional investors does not always enhance value.

Existing literature focuses separately on family firm innovations and financial leverage as outcome variables, emphasizing the role of institutional investors in both fields by adopting agency theory and socioemotional wealth framework. In this study, the authors go further by merging both relationships, investigating the dynamics of the institutional-family firm innovation relationship in influencing the firm's capital structure. The authors contribute to the ongoing debate by providing original findings on capital structure, governance and innovation, supported by rigorous methods to enhance family firms' decision-making.

A key issue faced by co-operative enterprises is how to raise external equity capital without compromising member control. The purpose of this study is to examine the potential of a special type of financial instrument called a Cooperative Capital Unit (CCU) introduced into the Australian legislation to facilitate external investment while maintaining member control.

A Delphi panel and six focus groups were used to provide an understanding of the challenges associated with cooperative governance and financing and to aid the development of a conceptual framework for the implementation of CCUs.

The findings from these Delphi panel and six focus groups were used to develop a proposed framework that the authors believe will be useful in structuring equity-like instruments depending on the purposes they might serve. In particular, the authors propose a new form of cooperative ownership and equity structure that could: better align member and investor interests; provide a mechanism to strengthen one role over the other depending on the needs of the cooperative; and provide investors with a better sense of security while retaining member control.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the cooperative ownership and equity structure proposed in this study are novel and not currently found in theory or practice. The insights provided by this study should, therefore, be of interest to a wide range of stakeholders, including cooperatives; professional advisors to these businesses; government regulators; investors; and researchers.

Since the beginning of the 2000s, investors have more frequently invested into professional football clubs, thereby radically changing the industry landscape. This review's purpose is to analyze and synthesize the state of research to understand motives, roles and implications of football club investors, and to provide recommendations for further research.

The paper presents an integrative literature review by identifying relevant English articles based on the search terms investor, owner, investment, ownership, shareholder and stakeholder in combination with soccer or football. Around 2,431 articles were reviewed. A total of 129 relevant articles was analyzed and synthesized within eight subject areas.

Investors in professional club football is a young research stream with a clear European focus. Investor motives and roles are diverse and implications are multidimensional. Investors mostly aim for indirect returns rather than pure profit- or win-maximization.

Football clubs comprise an own investment class for which the identified, unique specifics must be considered to develop a financially successful investment model. Thorough academic research of investors' inherent characteristics, investor-club pairings and the pillars of long-term strategies for successful investor-club liaisons are avenues of future research. Furthermore, the results illustrate the need for research outside of Europe.

The paper is the first systematic, integrative review of existing literature in the domain of equity investments into professional club football. The findings genuinely show that, depending on the investor type and ownership structure, investors have a wide impact in professional club football.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically analyze the role of differentiated margin system in leading investors' investing behavior and then optimize investor structure in futures markets.

Using economic experimental research method, this paper designs and conducts a futures market experiment according to experimental research's basic norms, thus acquiring needed and credible empirical data.

By analyzing the experimental data, it is found that compared with situations in futures markets that implement uniform margin system, investors' (especially speculators') futures open position and the ratio of their open position and futures turnover are both significantly higher, in futures markets that implement differentiated margin system. On the other hand, differentiated margin system has no effects on hedgers' futures turnover, but significantly reduces speculators' futures turnover.

The findings suggest that compared with uniform margin system, differentiated margin system is beneficial to effectively restrict both speculators' and hedgers' speculating behavior and lead hedgers' market participation.

In order to resolve the problem of unreasonable investor structure in China's futures market, i.e. lack of hedgers and over‐speculating, China's futures market's regulators should reform the margin system and adopt differentiated margin system to lead investors' rational behavior and optimize investor structure.

This paper empirically analyzes and verifies, for the first time, the roles of differentiated margin system in affecting investors' investing behavior. The futures market experiment designed and used in this study is a pioneering and exploratory experiment.

In order to further understand the research status and prospect, the purpose of this paper is to adopt a novel method in the research field of institutional investor to depict the knowledge structure and the evolution path over the past three decades.

Based on the 4,194 records retrieved from Web of Science, Citespace combined with VOSviewer are employed to perform visualized analysis.

The results reveal that the number of published articles of research on institutional investor has an exponential growth. Although the United States is the most significant contributor with more publications compared with other countries, Malaysia and Nigeria show higher centrality in the research network worldwide. Furthermore, “shareholder activism”, “corporate governance”, “global convergence”, “corporate reporting regulation” and “individual investor” are the largest five knowledge clusters. “Media coverage”, “corporate social responsibility” and “stock price crash risk” are the latest three knowledge clusters. Moreover, “governance worldwide”, “institutional character”, “dynamic information environment”, “investment patterns” and “sustainable development” are the potential extended research fields in the future.

This research helps the scholars and participants to capture the knowledge structure of research on institutional investors and to develop a reference to future opportunities.

This paper aims to investigate the role of informational and relational mechanisms on equity crowdfunding investors' conformity behaviors by focusing on a relational culture of China.

The data of 108 financing projects and 7,688 investment records from a union of Chinese equity crowdfunding platforms are gathered. Lead investors' response to a campaign and follow-investors’ former links explain investors' conformity by social network analysis (SNA) and ordinary least squares (OLS) analysis.

The results show that informational and relational influences drive conformity in Chinese equity crowdfunding. Moreover, the informational influence weakens in a highly centralized structure of linked investors.

The results add new knowledge to follow-investors’ conformity behaviors in equity crowdfunding and enrich the literature on conformity theory by finding the contextual effect of information-influenced conformity and the adaption of conformity theory to cultural uniqueness. Besides, this preliminary work also suggests opportunities for future research.

The paper inspires new consideration on a strategical use of follow-investors’ conformity mentality to promote successfully financing and reminds platform managers to be alert to the interference of small groups formed based on informal relationships to the normal financing order.

This is the first study that discovers the non-informational influence and the limited influence of information on equity crowdfunding conformity through contextual concerns.

This article attempts to answer the following questions: Who ultimately owns firms listed in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries? Does ownership structure depend on the institutional context? How does ownership affect firm performance? Do institutional factors influence the ownership–performance relationship?

We apply univariate analyses and generalised methods of moments estimations for a sample of 692 GCC listed firms during 2009–2015.

Our results reveal that corporations are mainly controlled by the state or families, the ownership structure is highly concentrated and pyramid structures are common in the region. Ownership is more concentrated in non-financial than financial firms, and ownership concentration and shareholder identity differ by institutional country setting. Finally, ownership concentration does not influence performance, but formal institutions play a moderating role in the relationship.

As our findings reveal potential type II agency problems due to ownership concentration, policymakers should raise awareness of professional corporate governance practices and tailor them to GCC countries’ institutional contexts.

Even with the introduction of new regulations by some GCC states to protect minority investors and promote corporate governance practices, ownership concentration is a rigid structure, and its use by investors to protect their economic endowment and power is culturally embedded.

Although previous studies have analysed ownership concentration and large shareholders’ identities across countries, this study fills a research gap investigating this phenomenon in-depth in emerging economies.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance and systemic risk sensitivity of Chinese listed companies. From the consumer loyalty and investor structure perspectives, the relationship between ESG performance and systemic risk sensitivity is analyzed.

Since Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI) ESG officially began to analyze and track China A-shares from 2018, 275 listed companies in the SynTao Green ESG testing list for 2015–2021 are selected as the initial model. To measure the systematic risk sensitivity, this study uses the beta coefficient, from capital asset pricing model (CPAM), employing statistics and data (STATA) software.

The study reveals that high ESG rating companies have high corresponding consumer loyalty and healthy trading structure of institutional investors, thereby the systemic risk sensitivity is lower. This paper reveals that companies with high ESG rating are significantly less sensitive to systemic risk than those with low ESG rating. At the same time, ESG has a weaker impact on the systemic risk of high-cap companies than low-cap companies.

The study helps the companies understand the influence of market value on the relationship between ESG performance and systemic risk sensitivity. Moreover, this paper explains explicitly why ESG performance insulates a firm’s stock from market downturns with the lens of consumer loyalty theory and investor structure theory.

The paper provides new insights on the company’s ESG performance that significantly affects the company’s systemic risk sensitivity.

This paper proposes and models stock loan lotteries, a financial innovation that improves individual investor welfare. Stock loan lotteries are prize-linked payoffs using securities lending fees.

This paper solves an existing theoretical model for an investor's utility-maximizing choices with and without stock loan lotteries and compares outcomes.

Stock loan lotteries motivate prospect theory investors to buy and hold risky assets with high expected returns. Stock loan lotteries improve welfare more for poor investors and improve welfare more in a model with market frictions such as trading costs.

Stock loan lotteries increase household savings, leading to greater financial wealth and security in retirement.

This paper proposes a new financial product that improves financial outcomes for individual investors.