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,...

The insurance industry plays a substantive vitality in the growth of the economy. However, there is limited literature on the activities of the insurance industry and economic growth in Ghana. As one of the fastest-growing economies in sub-Saharan Africa before the global pandemic in 2020, there...

Central securities depositories (CSDs) have opened mutual links, but most of them are seldom used. Why are idle links established? By allowing a foreign CSD to offer services through the link the domestic CSD invites competition. The domestic CSD can determine the cost efficiency of the rival by...

In a simple search model of money, we study a special kind of memory that gives rise to an arrangement resembling a payment network. Specifically, we assume that agents can pay a cost to access a central database that tracks payments made and received. Incentives must be provided to agents to...

In this paper we adopt a principal components analysis (PCA) to reduce the dimensionality of the term structure and employ autoregressive models (AR) to forecast principal components which, in turn, are used to forecast swap rates. Arguing in favor of structural variation, we propose data...

The paper proposes a data driven adaptive model selection strategy. The selection crite- rion measures economic exante forecasting content by means of trading implied cash flows. Empirical evidence suggests that the proposed strategy is neither exposed to selection bias nor to the risk of...

Weather influences our daily lives and choices and has an enormous impact on cooperate revenues and earnings. Weather derivatives differ from most derivatives in that the underlying weather cannot be traded and their market is relatively illiquid. The weather derivative market is therefore...

Weather derivatives (WD) are different from most financial derivatives because the underlying weather cannot be traded and therefore cannot be replicated by other financial instruments. The market price of risk (MPR) is an important parameter of the associated equivalent martingale measures used...

This paper proposes a profit model for spread trading by focusing on the stochastic movement of the price spread and its first hitting time probability density. The model is general in that it can be used for any financial instrument. The advantage of the model is that the profit from the trades...

The traditional avoidance literature undeservedly neglects tax base distribution as a factor affecting the avoidance price, and generally assumed to be equal to the avoidance cost. In reality, avoidance providers are usually either high-skilled specialists or insiders. The strong collusion thus,...