Patterns of political unification and fragmentation have crucial implications for comparative economic development. Diamond (1997) famously argued that “fractured land” was responsible for China's tendency toward political unification and Europe's protracted political fragmentation. We build...

Decentralized blockchain-based transactions benefit users through their openness, transparency, and immutability, which may come at the expense of privacy concerns. This paper shows that if there is a dilemma between decentralization and privacy protection, such that a more decentralized system...

Problem Definition: This paper investigates and compares two types of food safety auditing structures: decentralized audits and centralized audits. Academic/Practice Relevance: Decentralized food safety auditing systems are common among developing economies, i.e., different tiers of a food...

In this paper we introduce POSDAO, a Proof of Stake (POS) algorithm implemented as adecentralized autonomous organization (DAO). It is designed to provide a decentralized, fair,and energy efficient consensus for public chains. The algorithm works as a set of smartcontracts written in Solidity....

Bitcoin is a distributed system. The greatest dilemma it poses to the current legal and regulatory systems is that it is hardly possible to regulate a distributed network in a centralized fashion as decentralized permissionless blockchain-based cryptocurrencies are antithetical to the existing...

As technology revolutionizes the methods of both production and communication, economists have to constantly adjust their theories explaining the economy according to new market structures and efficiencies, and the controversial concept of decentralization emerging in recent decades should also...

A large number of financial assets are traded in both exchanges and over-the-counter markets (i.e., centralized and decentralized markets, CM and DM hereafter, respectively). Moreover, the last century has witnessed the secular migration of asset trading from CM to DM. To this end, this paper...

Using tick-level bitcoin data from February 2013 to April 2018, we show significant arbitrage spreads between global bitcoin markets. Spreads follow multiple consistent patterns. Minimum and maximum prices show significant clustering. Spreads increase during the early hours of a day (according...

In this document we summarize the findings of a high-level expert meeting on the topic of trust in blockchain based decentralized data infrastructures. The meeting concluded that contrary to the dominant discourse blockchain technologies are not trustless. In fact trust is a major, unresolved...

It is widely believed that the rotation and promotion system of local political chiefs plays an important role in China's economic miracle. In this paper, however, we focus on the potential cost of the inherent frequent turnovers of local chiefs. Based on a new manually-collected dataset on...