The phenomenal rise of cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance have prominently featured ``staking'': Besides offering a convenience yield for transactions as digital media of exchange, tokens are frequently staked (and slashed) for base-layer consensus generation or for incentivizing...

We develop a dynamic model of platform economy where tokens serve as a means of payments among platform users and are issued to finance investment in platform productivity. Tokens are optimally issued to reward platform owners when the productivity-normalized token supply is low and burnt to...

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...

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...

Using administrative universal firm registration data as well as primary offline and online surveys of small businesses in China, we examine (i) whether digitization helps Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) better cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, and (ii) whether the pandemic has spurred...