We study the impact of scarcity on intermediary profits through an analysis of the effects of the 2011 Japanese tsunami on the U.S. used car market. The tsunami devastated Japanese new car production for several months, which we show led to a demand surge for used cars. Wholesale and retail...

In November 2021, the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets (PWG) issued a report analyzing the rapid expansion and growing risks of the stablecoin market. PWG’s report determined that stablecoins pose a wide range of potential hazards, including the risks of inflicting large losses...

The ongoing institutional debate wonders whether robo advice may potentially bridge the advice gap, by reaching both ‘underserved' and ‘excluded' investors, who are unable to fully access the service. The present work aims to investigate the factors that may trigger both potential and actual...

This paper uses transaction-level data across millions of accounts to identify cryptocurrency investors and evaluate how fluctuations in individual crypto wealth affect household consumption, equity investment, and local real estate markets. We estimate an MPC out of unrealized crypto gains that...

Target Date Funds (TDFs) provide retirement investors, many of whom are unsophisticated or inattentive, with age-appropriate exposures to different asset classes like stocks and bonds. To maintain exposures, TDFs trade actively against market returns, buying stock funds when the stock market...

This paper uses transaction-level data across millions of accounts to identify cryptocurrency investors and evaluate how fluctuations in individual crypto wealth affect household consumption, equity investment, and local real estate markets. We estimate an MPC out of unrealized crypto gains that...

Italian Abstract: L’aumento della digitalizzazione nel mondo finanziario e dell’e-commerce ha favorito la forte crescita del “Buy Now Pay Later” (BNPL), che nella sua forma tradizionale consiste in un finanziamento a breve termine di importo contenuto, con il quale il consumatore...

This paper constructs new indexes of mutual fund returns from 1926 and compares the returns investors could have realized to published market returns. The stock fund investor would have underperformed by 120 - 158 bp annualized. The balanced fund investor would have lagged in the 1930s and...

The past decade has witnessed a phenomenal rise of digital wallets, and the COVID-19 pandemic further accelerated their adoption globally. Such e-wallets provide not only a conduit to external bank accounts but also internal payment options, including the ever-popular Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL)....

We assess the impact that real time money transfer technology has on consumer outcomes, particularly during periods of financial fragility. We do this by developing a new data set that documents use of Zelle - the most widely used P2P money transfer technology in the U.S. today - constructed...