We investigate the effect of financial liberalization on the probability of a banking crises in economies with poor transparency We construct a model with imperfect information where banks cannot distinguish between aggregate shocks on the one hand, and government’s policy and firms’...

We study the relation between the centralization of regulated financial information, information asymmetry, and capital market liquidity. Specifically, we exploit the staggered implementation of digital storage and access facilities (called Officially Appointed Mechanisms, or OAMs) for regulated...

The purpose of this Research Memorandum is to assess whether concepts from psychological theory may be useful in explaining herding and crises in financial markets. The conclusion is that the theory of cognitive dissonance, which assumes that the human brain seeks and processes information in a...

This paper explains financial contagion between two independent stock markets by fluctuations in international investors' attention allocation. I model the process of attention allocation that underlies portfolio investment in international markets using rationally inattentive agents. Investors...

We propose a new explanation for the granular origins of gravity in decentralized investment markets based on newly uncovered facts from large cross-border commercial real-estate transactions. Across a wide range of countries, buyers preferentially match with counterparties from own or proximate...

For seven cryptocurrencies—Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Cardano (ADA), Ripple (XRP), Solana (SOL), Litecoin (LTC), and Dogecoin (DOGE)—we compute the efficient set of portfolios for daily returns for the period January 2020 to September 2022. The paper reports the “background” statistics,...

Bitcoin is digital energy. This is part metaphor, part description. It is part explanation, part prophecy. It is part engineering, part finance. The digital energy that is Bitcoin is not mechanical, chemical, or electrical. It is the same “stuff” that saves you time when you draw on a store...