Social Stock Exchange Funding Dynamics: Navigating Factors for Social Enterprises and Sustainability Projects

Social Stock Exchanges (SSEs) are a novel development for creating social investment platforms for social enterprises (SEs) or sustainability projects (SPs) to raise capital from impact investors. In this article, we study the influencing factors driving higher funding rates for SEs/SPs on SSE platforms in the UK, Canada, Singapore, the USA and Jamaica, using panel fixed effects stepwise regression models, controlling for time, sector and country-year fixed effects. Our robust empirical findings show that both equity and debt financing tools utilized by SEs/SPs and women population as target beneficiaries have a positive and significant relationship with a higher funding rate when controlling for time and sector fixed effects. We also find that collaboration amongst SEs/SPs, as well as different kinds of firm ownership (non-profit, for-profit and cooperatives), has a significant positive effect on gaining a higher funding rate, when controlling for both time and sector fixed effects, as well as time, sector and country-year fixed effects. Overall, our article enlightens about the driving factors for building diverse SSE platforms globally.