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...

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...

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...

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...

We examine historical banking crises through the lens of bank equity declines, which cover a broad sample of episodes of banking distress both with and without banking panics. To do this, we construct a new dataset on bank equity returns and narrative information on banking panics for 46...

The behavioral finance literature has provided over a dozen explanations for the so-called excessive trading puzzle - retail investors trade a lot even though more trading hurts their performance. It is difficult to use transaction data to differentiate these explanations as they share similar...

Motivated by growing concerns about the risks and instability of China's financial system, this article reviews several commonly perceived financial risks and discusses their roots in China's politico-economic institutions. We emphasize the need to evaluate these risks within China's unique...

We use account-level data from the Shenzhen Stock Exchange to show that daily price limits, a widely adopted market stabilization mechanism, may lead to unintended, destructive market behavior: large investors tend to buy on the day when a stock hits the 10% upper price limit and then sell on...