Crowdfunding for cooperatives' Development in Morocco

Exchange scientist

• Amina Slimani, PhD student

Supervisor at Swiss institution

• University of Basel: Fabian Schär

Supervisor at home institution

• University of Cadi Ayyad, Marrakech, Morocco: Mustapha Ziky 

Presentation of the projet

I visited the University of Basel in the period of 15 September - 12 December, 2019. Theresearch stay was specially meant to start my exploratory research work under supervision of Professor Fabian Schar. My research stay was a part of my Ph.D.'s Program. There were two main reasons why I applied for this grant. First, I wanted to collect a list of references that I needed for my thesis and that were not available at the University of Cadi Ayyad , since the topic of my thesis, which is crowdfunding, is a new concept in Morocco. Second, I wanted to meet, potential supervisors, and current graduate students, who worked on crowdfunding, such as Dr. Markheim Marina, in order to gain a clearer sense of my thesis topic.

The theme of my research is crowdfunding, in particular in the interaction between financial inclusion and crowdfunding as a solution for cooperatives' development. At the University of Basel there are various professors working on fintech and innovative finance, such as my host supervisor Prof. Dr. Fabian Schar. When I first arrived to the University of Basel, the HR department gave me a university email and login, which allowed me to have access the university's library, to borrow books and consult journals, and access to all electronic resources of the university. Via my Unibas account, I had access to journals and articles for free which were crucial to further understand my research questions and even having a new research perspective in this sense. I had to attend two lectures. The first one was econometrics lecture. The empirical part of my  thesis is going to be about analyzing my survey data using Partial least squares modeling, which requires learning the basics of econometrics. This lecture helped me to know the basic econometric tools for cross-section and panel data. It was very useful to both conduct own empirical research projects and assess empirical research papers. A part of the lecture was about homework correction, using software's like Stata and R, which helped me to learn how to initiate and to simulate a model using theses softwares, to choose the adequate statistical method, discuss its identifying assumptions, and correctly interpret its results and to translate them into economically meaningful answers.

The second lecture was intermediate finance, it allowed me to learn about the basics of finance, by developing an empirical framework for long-term pricing effects in financial market, deriving the pricing implications of models that can explain the equity premium and return predictability: habits, long-run risks and rare disasters. Regarding my research, I first met my supervisor to clarify what my research is about, then he advised me to contact Dr. Marina Markheim, who helped me to clear up the research lead during our meeting. My main goal was collecting documentation to start my thesis literature review. The university VPN gave me access to useful articles, which allowed me to establish a references list to find more relevant sources, to identify any important publications about crowdfunding. My university email allowed me to contact different crowdfunding platforms with my Unibas mail to request for their Database in Morocco and North Africa, with the help of my Prof. Schar, we could write a letter to request for Database, but unfortunately, just one of them answered, with limited access to a public database.