We model a cryptocurrency as membership in a decentralized digital platform developed to facilitate transactions between users of certain goods or services. The rigidity induced by the cryptocurrency price having to clear membership demand with supply of token by speculators, especially with...

By exploiting variation in state capital gains taxation as an instrument, we analyze the economic consequences of housing speculation during the U.S. housing boom in the 2000s. We find that housing speculation, anchored, in part, on extrapolation of past housing price changes, led not only to...

This paper develops a model to analyze information aggregation in commodity markets. Through centralized trading, commodity prices aggregate dispersed information about the strength of the global economy among goods producers whose production has complementarity, and serve as price signals to...

China's gradualistic approach allowed the government to learn how the economy reacts to small policy changes, and to adjust its reforms before implementing them in full. With fully developed financial markets, however, private actors' may front-run future policy changes making it impossible for...

China's economic model involves active government intervention in financial markets. We develop a theoretical framework in which interventions prevent a market breakdown and a volatility explosion caused by the reluctance of short-term investors to trade against noise traders. In the presence of...

We develop a model to analyze information aggregation and learning in housing markets. In the presence of pervasive informational frictions, housing prices serve as important signals to households and capital producers about the economic strength of a neighborhood. Our model provides a novel...

This paper derives a preference for data privacy from consumers' temptation utility. This approach facilitates a welfare analysis of different data privacy regulations, such as the GDPR enacted by the European Union and the CCPA enacted by the state of California, when a fraction of the...

Since the 1990s, China's real estate market has experienced a dramatic and long-lasting boom across China. This boom has led to substantial concerns in both academic and policy circles that the rising housing prices might have developed into a gigantic housing bubble, which might eventually...

China's economic reforms over the past 40 years have led to a mixed economic structure with the government playing a key role in an increasingly market-driven economy. This paper expands a standard growth model of Barro (1990) to incorporate this structure, with a particular focus on including...

This paper presents a dynamic equilibrium model of bond markets, in which two groups of agents hold heterogeneous expectations about future economic conditions. Our model shows that heterogeneous expectations can not only lead to speculative trading, but can also help resolve several challenges...