The emergence of new technologies leads to the reconsideration of business processes identified with older technologies, but many advantages that they promise do not immediately appear. The transfer of the ledgers kept in paper form to the computer environment presents a challenge as a revolution in the field of payments. However, since this change takes place in the form of recording rather than recording the transaction, the processes underlying the transactions remain substantially the same.
In this paper, by using econometric techniques we provide evidence that bitcoin exhibited the formation of speculative bubble in 2017. To conceptually rationalize the results, we delve into the extant theoretical approaches developed by Kindleberger's (1978) speculative bubbles and Minsky's (1992) financial instability hypothesis. Certainly, bitcoin has spurred a revolution in payment technology that, if treated cautiously can facilitate financial intermediation and inclusion. Ultimately, whether or not bitcoin constitutes a bubble is a decision for investors as the road to hell is paved with good promises.
The recent decade has witnessed an extraordinary degree of innovation in the financial sector. Developments in financial technology, computing power, and networking theory have allowed decentralized online platforms such as Bitcoin to fundamentally change the way that financial services are provided. While these innovations have been applauded by many as bringing a welcome degree of competition to a sector long dominated by powerful incumbents, they also create a set of challenges for current financial regulation. How do fiduciary standards apply to algorithms? How does online finance affect the behavior of investors? And more generally, how can regulators monitor and constrain the financial industry when it is increasingly run by autonomous, dispersed computer networks? This Article argues that current financial regulation is inadequate to address the unique problems presented by the rise of Bitcoin and other fintech industries. In particular, these innovations raise concerns about the ability of financial regulation to promote three inter-related financial goals: the efficient allocation of capital, the protection of consumers, and the prevention of systemic risk. These goals, at the core of current approaches to financial regulation, are all challenged by fintech’s defining feature: its reliance on disembodied institutions and complex algorithms for its functioning. These traits render the traditional tools used by regulators to discipline markets—substantive behavioral obligations, the threat of sanctions, and the constraining effect of reputation—largely ineffective. The Article concludes by proposing a set of principles to guide lawmakers in designing a more effective financial regulatory structure for the Bitcoin era.
The thesis consists of three chapters and studies the role of corporate bond dealers as liquidity providers in decentralized over-the-counter markets. The first two empirical chapters explore the impact of dealers' inventory financing constraints on their ability to act as middlemen in corporate bond markets. Specifically, the first chapter provides empirical evidence that dealers' financing constraints are a crucial determinant of the costs of their liquidity provision. The second chapter demonstrates that bonds handled by dealers with higher financing constraints are associated with substantially larger and abrupt price declines and slower price reversals in case of a rating downgrade from investment to non-investment grades. The third theoretical chapter studies the effects of post-trade disclosure on a dealer's dynamic trading strategy in a two-period dealership market and shows that in terms of customer welfare neither a regime with full nor one without post-trade transparency is universally dominating.
The growing literature on Bitcoin can be divided in two groups. One performs an economic analysis of Bitcoin focusing on its monetary characteristics. The other one looks takes a financial look at the price of Bitcoin. Interestingly, both of these groups have not given much more than passing comments to the problem whether or not Bitcoin has the right monetary rule. This paper argues that Bitcoin in particular, and cryptocurrencies in general, do not have a good monetary rule, and that this shortcoming seriously limits its prospect of becoming a well-established currency.
Author Jiří Málek acknowledges the financial support of Czech Science Foundation with grant GAČR 18-05244S “Innovative Approaches to Credit Risk Management” and Institutional support IP 100040/1020. Author Tran van Quang is grateful for the financial support of grant GAČR 18-05244S “Innovative Approaches to Credit Risk Management” of Czech Science Foundation.
The rise of centralized mining pools for risk sharing does not necessarily undermine the decentralization required for permissionless blockchains: Each individual miner's cross-pool diversification and endogenous fees charged by pools generally sustain decentralization, because larger pools better internalize their externality on global hash rates, charge higher fees, attract disproportionately fewer miners, and thus grow more slowly. Instead, mining pools as a financial innovation escalate the arms race among competing miners and thus significantly increase the energy consumption of proof-of-work-based consensus mechanisms. Empirical evidence from Bitcoin mining supports our model predictions. The economic insights inform many other blockchain protocols as well as the industrial organization of mainstream sectors with similar characteristics but ambiguous prior findings.
Cel – Celem opracowania było przedstawienie w aspekcie poznawczym różnych opinii odnośnie do istoty kryptowalut, jako nowego elektronicznego instrumentu płatniczego i jego wpływu na bezpieczeństwo ekonomiczne gospodarki zarówno światowej, jak i lokalnych. Metodologia badania – Analiza opinii finansowych i gospodarczych, analiza źródeł prawa, prezentacja danych statystycznych dotycząca wartości kryptowalut, szacowanie wpływu kryptowalut na poziom gospodarki wybranych państw na podstawie statystycznych danych gospodarczych. Wynik – Opinie na temat istoty kryptowalut i ich oddziaływania są skrajnie zróżnicowane. Kategoria ta, ze względu na jeszcze krótki okres funkcjonowania i odmienność w stosunku do tradycyjnych instrumentów finansowych, nie doczekała się jeszcze pełnej definicji prawnej. W obszarze funkcjonowania banków centralnych zauważa się skrajne stanowiska – od zakazu wprowadzania kryptowalut na rynki finansowe, aż do chęci ich emisji. Także w ocenach ich wpływu na poziom gospodarczy krajów zauważa się odmienne stanowiska: od negacji ich wpływu, a nawet zagrożeń, aż do nadawania kryptowalutom rangi czynnika wzrostu gospodarczego. Oryginalność/wartość – Opracowanie wybiegające poza klasyczne ukazanie mechanizmu funkcjonowania kryptowalut, a w szczególności jako czynnik spekulacyjny przy decyzjach finansowych indywidualnych inwestorów. Wyniki sugerują brak jednolitego stanowiska i opinii zarówno badaczy problemu, jak i państw i instytucji gospodarczych, finansowych i nadzorujących. Brak także wypracowanych mechanizmów ochronnych przed negatywnym wpływem kryptowalut na bezpieczeństwo ekonomiczne gospodarek.
The aim of this paper is to analyze the demand of both traditional and new media of exchange – as cryptocurrencies and central bank digital currencies – proposing a novel specification of the demand for money. In this specification, the medium of payment (MOP) has three properties: the first two are the MOP’s standard functions as a medium of exchange and as a store of value, while the third is a novel function as a store of privacy (anonymity value). The proposed framework is tested using a laboratory experiment. Our results show that anonymity matters, but less of the other two properties; at the same time, the presence of anonymity increases the overall appeal of a MOP, particularly if the individuals are risk prone; given anonymity, the sacrifice ratio between liquidity risk and opportunity cost are relatively high.
36 Yale Journal on Regulation 735 (2019).Fintech is the hottest topic in finance today. Recent advances in cryptography, data analytics, and artificial intelligence are visibly “disrupting” traditional methods of delivering financial services and conducting financial transactions. Less visibly, fintech is also changing the way we think about finance: The rise of fintech is gradually recasting our collective understanding of the financial system as simply another sphere of normatively neutral information technology and objective computer science. By making financial transactions faster, cheaper, and more easily accessible, fintech seems to promise a micro-level “win-win” solution to the financial system’s many ills.This Article challenges such narratives and presents an alternative account of fintech as a systemic, macro-level phenomenon. Grounding the analysis of evolving fintech trends in a broader institutional context, the Article exposes the normative and political significance of the current fintech moment. It argues that the arrival of fintech enables a potentially decisive shift in the underlying public-private balance of powers, competencies, and roles in the financial system.In developing this argument, the Article makes three principal scholarly contributions. First, it introduces the concept of the New Deal settlement in finance: a fundamental political arrangement, in force for nearly a century, pursuant to which profit-seeking private actors retain control over allocating capital and generating financial risks, while the sovereign public bears responsibility for maintaining systemic financial stability. Second, the Article advances a novel conceptual framework for understanding the deep-seated financial dynamics that have eroded the New Deal settlement in recent decades. In particular, it offers a working taxonomy of principal mechanisms that both (a) enable private market actors to continuously synthesize tradable financial assets and scale up trading activities, and (b) undermine the public’s ability to manage the resulting system-wide risks. Finally, the Article shows how and why specific fintech applications – cryptocurrencies, distributed ledger technologies, digital crowdfunding, and robo-advising – are poised to amplify the effect of these destabilizing mechanisms, and thus potentially exacerbate the tensions and imbalances in today’s financial markets and the broader economy. It is this potential that renders fintech a public policy challenge of the highest order.