Decentralized Autonomous Organizations ("DAOs'') are crypto-native organizations run without centralized management. Instead, managerial and financial decisions are made by token holders via a decentralized voting process. Taking advantage of the transparency of blockchains, we gather data on...

A self contained review of the pricing of interest rate swaps across both traditional and decentralised finance. The pricing formulas for the traditional case are examined and two popular methodologies for curve construction––explicit and implicit interpolation of the discount...

The concept of ‘DeFi’ (decentralised finance) has gained prominence in recent years. Enabled by technological developments – in particular blockchain and smart contracts – DeFi mimics the more traditional, centralised finance ‘in an open, decentralised, permissionless way’. The...

This paper examines the consequence of decentralization in the management of canal irrigation for spatial allocation of water and agricultural performance. Under centralized management, farmers closer to the canal tend to over-extract water, resulting in spatial mis-allocation. We test whether...

We study, theoretically and in the laboratory, three simple decentralized mechanisms to reallocate positions in a queuing problem. In our environment, players have heterogeneous values for time and arrive in random order to a queue before service starts. While waiting for service, they can...

The effects of foreign aid on a decentralised health system are analysed in a theoretical framework where the donor has imperfect information about the local health needs while the central and local governments do not engage in self-interested efforts upon receiving aid. I discuss the...

Recent years have witnessed noticeable expansion of new technologies related to the distributed ledger technology (DLT) and blockchain networks in financial markets. As developments unfold, the key question that emerges is whether these technologies would work to foster traditional services or,...

Decentralized Finance (‘DeFi’) has gained tremendous momentum over the past three years by using novel approaches to disintermediating financial institutions in the provision of financial services. However, empirical research in this field is still rare, and a more comprehensive...

“Decentralised finance” (DeFi) refers to a range of applications in the crypto-asset space that seek to disintermediate the provision of financial services through reliance on self-executing computer code (“smart contracts”). DeFi has so far been mainly self-referential in that it has...