After remaining close to 1 US Dollar since its inception in November 2020, the algorithmic stablecoin UST crashed in the two weeks of May 9th to May 15th, 2022, leading to a price collapse of the underlying LUNA token and the erasure of more than 50 Billion U.S. Dollar or 90% in market value

Trading in cryptocurrencies has grown rapidly over the last decade, primarily dominated by retail investors. Using a dataset of 200,000 retail traders from eToro, we show that they have a different model of the underlying price dynamics in cryptocurrencies relative to other assets. Retail...

I discuss private and central-bank-issued digital currencies, summarizing my prior research. I argue that prices of private digital currencies such as bitcoin follow random walks or, more generally, risk-adjusted martingales. For central bank digital currencies, I argue that they enhance the...

This article applies simple methods from computational linguistics to analyze unstructured corporate texts for economic surveillance. We apply text-as-data approaches to earnings conference call transcripts, patent texts, and job postings to uncover unique insights into how markets and firms...

We characterize how risk evolves during a crisis. Using high-frequency data, we find that the first two principal components (PCs) of the covariance matrix of global asset returns experience large, sudden, and temporary spikes coinciding with well-known crises - Covid-19 pandemic, Global...

We provide a first look into the drivers of household cryptocurrency investing. Analyzing consumer transaction data for millions of U.S. households, we find that, except for high income early adopters, cryptocurrency investors resemble the general population. These investors span all income...

Environmental externalities from cryptomining may be large, but have not been linked causally to mining incentives. We exploit daily variation in Bitcoin price as a natural experiment for an 86 megawatt coal-fired power plant with on-site cryptomining. We find that carbon emissions respond...

We develop a dynamic model of platform economy where tokens derive value by facilitating transactions among users and the platform conducts optimal token-supply policy. Token supply increases when new tokens are issued to finance platform growth and to reward platform owners. Token supply...

Central banks around the world are exploring and in some cases even piloting Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). CBDCs promise to realize a broad range of new capabilities, including direct government disbursements to citizens, frictionless consumer payment and money-transfer systems, and a...

In October 2014, all 4,494 undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were given access to Bitcoin, a decentralized digital currency. As a unique feature of the experiment, students who would generally adopt first were placed in a situation where many of their peers received...