Blockchain-based smart contracts can potentially replace certain traditional contracts through decentralized enforcement and reduced transaction costs. However, scalability is a key bottleneck hindering their broader application and adoption, often leading to concentrated or exclusive networks....

Web3 and DeFi are widely advocated as innovations for greater financial inclusion and democratization. We assemble the most comprehensive dataset to date on the largest Web3 ecosystem and use large-scale computing to conduct an initial investigation. We describe Ethereum's network structure,...

We document that value-to-price, the ratio of Residual-Income-Model-based valuation to market price, subsumes the power of book-to-market ratio and many other value or quality measures in predicting stock returns. Long-short value-to-price portfolios hedge against momentum, revitalize the...

Economic interactions, such as crowdfunding, often involve sequential actions, observational learning, and contingent project implementation. We incorporate all-or-nothing thresholds in a canonical model of information cascades. Early supporters effectively delegate their decisions to a...

While the advent of cryptocurrencies and digital assets holds promise for improving and disrupting financial systems by offering cheap, quick, and secure transfer of value, it also opens up new payment channels for cybercrimes. A prerequisite to solving a problem is understanding the nature of...

We model platform competition with endogenous data generation, collection, and sharing, thereby providing a unifying framework to evaluate data-related regulation and antitrust policies. Data are jointly produced from users' economic activities and platforms' investments in data infrastructure....

We describe the landscape of taxation in the crypto markets, especially that concerning U.S. taxpayers, and examine how recent increases in tax scrutiny have led to changes in trading behavior by crypto traders. We predict under a simple theoretical framework and then empirically document that...

We introduce systematic tests exploiting robust statistical and behavioral patterns in trading to detect fake transactions on 29 cryptocurrency exchanges. Regulated exchanges feature patterns consistently observed in financial markets and nature; abnormal first-significant-digit distributions,...

We develop a new class of tree-based models (P-Tree) for analyzing (unbalanced) panel data utilizing global (instead of local) split criteria that incorporate economic guidance to guard against overfitting while preserving interpretability. We grow a P-Tree top-down to split the cross section of...

We build a two-country general equilibrium model to analyze the effects of cross-border data flows and pre-existing development gaps in data economies on each country's production and international trade. Raw data as byproducts of consumption can be transformed into various types of working data...