NGOs Funding Trust, Blockchain and RedChain Prof. Victor Alvarez, MBA ORCID iD: 0009-0001-7933-3830 Department Research in Economic , IEBS Business School, 08840 Barcelona, Spain Department of Humanitarian Economics and NGO Management ETU Institute, Birkirkara, Malta Abstract Persistent trust deficits between donor agencies and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) continue to undermine the efficiency and effectiveness of humanitarian and development assistance, particularly in low-income and institutionally fragile environments. Concerns regarding fund diversion, beneficiary duplication, limited transparency, and weak accountability mechanisms have intensified demand for innovative governance solutions. This paper explores the potential of blockchain technology to strengthen trust in NGO funding through two complementary models: (1) a permissioned blockchain framework for beneficiary verification and aid tracking, and (2) RedChain, a privacy-preserving blockchain infrastructure for humanitarian assistance developed by the Spanish Red Cross. The proposed NGO Trust framework utilizes a distributed ledger to maintain immutable and auditable records of beneficiary registration and fund allocation. By recording encrypted identity credentials and digitally signed transactions, the system reduces the risk of duplicate beneficiary claims, fraud, and reporting inconsistencies across participating organizations. A participation and penalty mechanism further enhances network integrity by incentivizing honest behavior among stakeholders. RedChain extends this approach by integrating blockchain-based transaction recording with zero-knowledge proof technologies, enabling transparent aid distribution while preserving beneficiary privacy. With nearly one million registered transactions, the platform demonstrates the operational viability of blockchain-enabled humanitarian governance at scale. By synthesizing these approaches, this paper proposes an integrated framework for transparent NGO funding, combining beneficiary integrity verification, transaction traceability, privacy protection, and donor accountability. The findings suggest that distributed ledger technologies can significantly improve trust relationships between donors, NGOs, and beneficiaries, while supporting more efficient, transparent, and equitable aid distribution systems. The study contributes to the emerging literature on digital governance, nonprofit economics, and technology-enabled development finance by identifying blockchain as a foundational infrastructure for next-generation humanitarian and social-impact ecosystems. Keywords Blockchain; NGO governance; Humanitarian aid; Trust; Transparency; Beneficiary duplication; Zero-knowledge proofs; RedChain; Donor accountability; Privacy-preserving technology; Smart contracts; Aid distribution JEL Classification G30 – Corporate Finance and Governance: General L31 – Nonprofit Institutions; NGOs; Social Entrepreneurship O33 – Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes F35 – Foreign Aid H84 – Disaster Aid and Relief 1. Introduction Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) play a central role in delivering humanitarian assistance, poverty alleviation programs, disaster relief, education, health services, and sustainable development initiatives worldwide. According to the United Nations and international development agencies, NGOs have become increasingly important intermediaries between donors, governments, and beneficiaries, particularly in regions where state capacity is limited or institutional trust is weak. Despite their growing influence, concerns regarding transparency, accountability, and the efficient allocation of resources continue to challenge the nonprofit sector (Edwards & Hulme, 1996; Ebrahim, 2003; Najam, 1996). The economics of nonprofit organizations has long emphasized the importance of trust as a mechanism for overcoming information asymmetries between donors and service providers (Hansmann, 1980). Donors frequently lack direct information regarding how funds are allocated, whether intended beneficiaries actually receive assistance, and whether reported outcomes accurately reflect project performance. This information gap creates principal-agent problems in which monitoring costs are high and opportunities for misreporting, inefficiency, or fraud may arise (Pratt & Zeckhauser, 1985; Tirole, 2006). As charitable donations and development aid increasingly flow through complex international networks, maintaining donor confidence has become a critical governance challenge. A substantial body of research has documented accountability deficiencies within humanitarian and development organizations. Ebrahim (2005) argues that traditional accountability systems often emphasize upward reporting to donors while providing limited mechanisms for beneficiary participation and verification. Similarly, Gugerty and Prakash (2010) note that transparency initiatives frequently rely on self-reported information that is difficult to independently audit. In international aid programs, concerns have emerged regarding duplicate beneficiary registrations, diversion of funds, weak recordkeeping systems, and fragmented information sharing among organizations operating in the same geographic areas (World Bank, 2016; OECD, 2021). Digital technologies have increasingly been proposed as tools to address these governance challenges. The broader literature on e-governance and digital accountability suggests that information systems can reduce transaction costs, improve record accuracy, and strengthen institutional transparency (Heeks, 2002; Cordella & Tempini, 2015). Among emerging technologies, blockchain has attracted considerable attention due to its capacity to create immutable, distributed, and verifiable records without requiring centralized trust authorities (Nakamoto, 2008). Since the introduction of Bitcoin, blockchain applications have expanded far beyond digital currencies into supply chain management, public administration, healthcare, identity systems, and humanitarian operations (Tapscott & Tapscott, 2016; Casino, Dasaklis & Patsakis, 2019). Scholars have argued that distributed ledger technologies may improve transparency and accountability by creating tamper-resistant transaction histories accessible to multiple stakeholders (Swan, 2015; Treiblmaier, 2018). Within development economics, blockchain-based systems have been proposed to improve aid distribution, reduce corruption, facilitate identity verification, and enhance financial inclusion in underserved regions (Kshetri, 2017; Saberi et al., 2019). Recent humanitarian applications provide evidence of growing institutional interest in blockchain-enabled governance. The United Nations World Food Programme's Building Blocks initiative demonstrated the feasibility of blockchain-based refugee assistance by facilitating aid transfers while reducing administrative costs and improving transaction traceability. Similarly, studies by Juskalian (2018), Mikhaylov et al. (2020), and Wang et al. (2022) suggest that distributed ledger technologies may strengthen accountability mechanisms in humanitarian environments characterized by weak institutional infrastructure. Nevertheless, important challenges remain. Public transparency requirements often conflict with the need to protect sensitive beneficiary information. Humanitarian organizations must balance donor demands for accountability with ethical obligations regarding privacy, dignity, and data protection. The emergence of privacy-enhancing cryptographic techniques, particularly zero-knowledge proofs, offers a potential solution to this dilemma by enabling verification without revealing underlying personal information (Goldwasser, Micali & Rackoff, 1989; Ben-Sasson et al., 2014). These technologies have increasingly been incorporated into blockchain architectures seeking to combine transparency with confidentiality. This paper contributes to the growing literature on nonprofit governance and development finance by examining two complementary blockchain-based approaches to strengthening trust in NGO funding systems. The first is a permissioned blockchain framework designed to prevent beneficiary duplication and improve donor oversight through cryptographically verifiable registration and transaction records. The second is RedChain, a privacy-preserving humanitarian aid platform developed by the Spanish Red Cross that combines blockchain technology with zero-knowledge proofs to support transparent aid distribution while safeguarding beneficiary privacy. By integrating insights from these models, the study proposes a comprehensive framework for Transparent NGO Funding that addresses four persistent governance challenges: beneficiary verification, transaction traceability, privacy preservation, and donor accountability. The analysis contributes to the fields of nonprofit economics, digital governance, and development finance by demonstrating how blockchain technologies may reduce information asymmetries, lower monitoring costs, and strengthen trust among donors, NGOs, and beneficiaries. Ultimately, the paper argues that distributed ledger systems can serve as foundational infrastructure for a new generation of accountable, transparent, and privacy-respecting humanitarian ecosystems.
This article studies the relationship between creator-related cues and market outcomes – price, time to sale, and non-sale – of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in a leading marketplace. We first extract textual and visual indicators and summarize them into cognitive and affective composites using principal component analysis. We then estimate hedonic regression and duration models with creator-level random effects and recover creator-related components using empirical Bayes shrinkage. These components provide a descriptive decomposition of market outcomes into variation linked to observable asset cues and residual variation systematically associated with creators. We find substantial heterogeneity in creator-related components for both price and liquidity, while simple social-media metrics account for only a small share of that heterogeneity. We also model non-sale probability and show that creators’ social media activity is modestly associated with sale failure. Methodologically, the paper offers a transparent approach to mapping creator-related heterogeneity when creator metadata and standard brand-equity measures are limited.
Conglomerates are among the most complex organizational forms in capitalism. They own multiple businesses, often across different industries, geographies, operating models, and risk profiles. Some conglomerates own insurance companies, manufacturers, railroads, energy utilities, retailers, banks, technology firms, industrial businesses, media assets, and consumer brands under one corporate umbrella. The central challenge is not only how to operate these businesses, but how to allocate capital among them. A conglomerate must answer a difficult question: Who decides where the money goes? Should capital allocation be centralized at head office, where senior executives and finance committees compare business units and approve investments? Or should capital decisions be decentralized, allowing subsidiary managers to operate autonomously while headquarters focuses only on major capital deployment? Should internal cash flows remain inside business units, or should they be swept to corporate headquarters and redeployed across the group? Should acquisitions be initiated by subsidiaries, by corporate development teams, or by the CEO? Should capital budgeting follow rigid committee processes or owner-oriented judgment? These questions define the capital allocation architecture of the conglomerate. Berkshire Hathaway represents one of the most successful decentralized conglomerate models in modern business history. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger built Berkshire around autonomy, trust, permanent ownership, strong subsidiary managers, and centralized capital allocation at the highest level. Berkshire’s headquarters remains small, and its operating subsidiaries are largely left alone. Yet the most important capital allocation decisions—large acquisitions, major equity investments, cash deployment, and insurance float allocation—have historically been handled centrally by Buffett and, increasingly, Berkshire’s designated capital allocation successors. By contrast, many corporations use centralized capital committees. These structures often include formal budgeting processes, investment review boards, hurdle rates, discounted cash flow models, divisional competition for capital, strategic planning cycles, and executive approval layers. Centralization can improve control, risk management, consistency, and capital discipline. However, it can also create bureaucracy, slow decisions, distort incentives, and separate capital decision-makers from operating reality. This chapter compares decentralized and centralized capital allocation models in conglomerates. It argues that neither model is universally superior. The right model depends on business quality, management trust, governance, capital intensity, complexity, regulatory risk, and the competence of headquarters. However, the Berkshire model demonstrates a powerful lesson: decentralization can compound value when paired with exceptional managerial selection, strong culture, conservative financing, and disciplined central capital allocation.
Type of the article: Research ArticleAbstractShareholder voting in conventional corporate governance remains constrained by intermediated proxy systems, information asymmetries, and limited transparency. This study aims to systematically synthesize recent scholarly, legal, and policy literature to evaluate whether, and under what legal and institutional conditions, blockchain-based voting and decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) architectures can enhance shareholder democracy through hybrid “code-plus-law” governance models. Adopting an interdisciplinary qualitative design, the paper combines a systematic literature review with doctrinal legal analysis, drawing on a broad corpus of recent scholarly, legal, and policy sources published from 2020 through 2025. Evidence is synthesized into six structured comparative tables covering voting auditability, shareholder participation, token concentration, legal recognition, DAO design features, and hybrid “code-plus-law” governance models. The review highlights consistent improvements in three core dimensions compared to legacy proxy systems: enhanced auditability and end-to-end verifiability, speedier aggregation of voting outcomes, and broader feasibility of cross-border shareholder participation. Simultaneously, four risks keep appearing: token concentration (“whale dominance”), technical and governance scalability limits, unequal digital literacy and access, and persistent gaps in the legal recognition and enforceability of DAOs. Overall, the findings suggest that hybrid arrangements that combine blockchain-based transparency and efficiency with conventional legal safeguards are more apt to provide for inclusive participation and durable legitimacy than purely code-based or purely traditional governance models.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) applications have attracted a recent surge in popularity. Token contracts underpin DeFi applications by managing liquidity. To regulate the interactions between token contracts and DeFi applications, token standards have been proposed to ensure predictable execution semantics and out-comes, thereby enabling reliable interoperability. However, there is no mechanism to prevent developers from customizing token contracts in ways that violate these standards. Even without malicious intent, such customizations pose severe risks to DeFi applications. Therefore, a comprehensive understanding of financially risky behaviors in token contracts is essential to better safeguard DeFi applications. To this end, we conduct the first systematic study that uncovers these behaviors and their concrete threats to DeFi applications. Specifically, we begin by constructing a taxonomy of nine financially risky behaviors in ERC20 token contracts. We then recognize the financial risks these behaviors pose to DeFi applications, which can result in significant financial losses, through a rigorous open-coding process on the real-world incidents of DeFi applications. To enable a large-scale study, we develop FRBScan, a novel tool that automatically identifies financially risky behaviors in ERC20 token contracts by combining Datalog analysis with token behavior inference heuristics. Our evaluation on a manually labeled dataset shows that FRBScan achieves 98.7% accuracy in identifying financially risky behaviors, with an average analysis time of just 4.73 seconds per contract. In contrast, the baseline tool Pied-Piper achieves only 72.5% accuracy while taking approximately 27.2 times longer, highlighting FRBScan's superior efficiency and effectiveness. Leveraging FRBScan, we conduct a large-scale study of ERC20 token contracts in Ethereum, and find that each type of financially risky behavior is present in practice, with 65.8% of token contracts exhibiting at least one such behavior. These findings underscore the widespread prevalence of financially risky behaviors in practice, and highlight the substantial threats they pose to DeFi applications.
We model endogenous trading and liquidity provision at a decentralized exchange (DEX) and demonstrate that increasing DEX trading fees can increase DEX trading volume. DEXs employ a mechanical pricing rule whereby price impacts decrease with inventory that DEXs acquire by offering fee revenues to investors. Consequently, higher DEX fees can incentivize higher inventory, thereby reducing price impacts. Moreover, the reduction of price impact can offset the increase in fees so that the marginal cost of DEX trading declines despite charging a higher trading fee. In turn, lower DEX marginal trading costs lead to an increase in DEX trading volume. This paper was accepted by Agostino Capponi, finance.
Abstract Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) offer the promise of enabling an enterprise to combine a democratic member-run governance system with the efficiency and predictability of automation. DAOs challenge traditional conventions about corporate governance in several ways. By enabling enterprises to craft customized governance structures, they challenge the ability of participants to understand and price businesses that employ novel governance features. By broadening the potential scope of who can participate in governance systems, DAOs respond to an emerging debate over stakeholder governance. They also raise important issues about accountability and the extent to which a decentralized governance structure in which individual decision-makers are not constrained by fiduciary principles can effectively limit conflicts of interest and self-dealing. This chapter considers these features of DAO corporate governance. It embraces the potential offered by the DAO structure to rethink traditional corporate governance norms and highlights the implications of the governance choices made by DAOs.
This paper examines whether token design can serve as a signal of venture quality in decentralized fundraising environments. We develop a simple model in which an entrepreneur privately informed about project quality chooses between a neutral token and an incentive-compatible token embedding a milestone-contingent feature. While the latter increases the likelihood of attracting external funding, it imposes a private cost on the entrepreneur.Because token design is publicly observable prior to investment, it affects investor beliefs and financing decisions. The model shows that a separating equilibrium arises only for an intermediate range of design costs. If incentive-compatible features are too inexpensive, low-quality ventures mimic high-quality ones and the signal loses credibility. If they are too costly, even high-quality entrepreneurs refrain from adopting them, leading to pooling outcomes.The paper highlights how signaling can be embedded directly in token architecture through observable design choices that constrain entrepreneurial behavior. The model also yields testable empirical implications: token structures imposing meaningful constraints on founders should attract greater investor participation, whereas nearly costless features should not predict venture quality. These predictions are consistent with emerging evidence on token-based financing.
We document a sizeable disposition effect in the market for non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Using a comprehensive transaction dataset from OpenSea, we show that NFT holders systematically realize gains prematurely while holding onto losses, mirroring behavior documented in traditional equity markets. Consistent with a high participation rate of retail investors and the lack of clear fundamental values, the effect is significantly more severe than in equity markets. We further find that the magnitude of the disposition effect attenuates in December, consistent with end-of-year tax-loss harvesting incentives, suggesting that on-chain transactions can be monitored by tax authorities. Finally, to address the NFT market's episodic illiquidity, we introduce a novel measure of the disposition effect based on the time-to-sale of listed assets. Our findings extend behavioral finance theory to digital-asset markets and provide new tools for studying the disposition effect in illiquid trading environments.
This paper studies governance participation in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) to evaluate whether participation insights from corporate governance extend to token-weighted, decentralized voting systems. Using proposal-level data from 1,959 governance proposals across five major DAOs between July 2022 and December 2024, we examine two distinct dimensions of participation: voting-power mobilization and participation breadth. We test whether marginal procedural design features—specifically voting-window duration—affect participation once institutional identity is controlled for. Across linear and count-data specifications, voting-window duration has no statistically or economically meaningful association with either participation measure. In contrast, persistent DAO-level differences explain the vast majority of participation variation, indicating that persistent DAO-level heterogeneity accounts for substantially more variation in participation than marginal differences in voting-window duration. We further document dynamic participation patterns: later proposals mobilize greater voting power without expanding the participating electorate. By exploiting the transparency and proposal-level granularity of DAO governance (Yermack, 2017), this study directly observes participation patterns that are typically inferred in shareholder voting. The findings reinforce a central insight of corporate governance theory: participation is more closely associated with institutional identity than with marginal differences in voting window duration.
ABSTRACT This study examines how higher employer social security costs affect the allocate decision‐making authority using data from Chinese listed companies from 2007 to 2022, employing both fixed‐effects and difference‐in‐differences (DID) models. Based on an extensive sample of firms, we find that higher social security costs are associated with a major delegation of authority from parent companies to their affiliates. Evidence suggests this adjustment occurs because the extra cost changes each firms' competitive environment and operating results. The impact is most pronounced in non–state‐owned firms and in firms that face tight financing constraints, indicating that ownership and financing flexibility shape the response. Our findings contribute to the organizational design literature by demonstrating that social security costs can act as an external driver of firm decentralization.
Mohd Shahid Ali, Alam Ahmad, Mohd Atif, Monika Mittal · 5 authors
Decentralized exchanges (DEXs) are one of the keystones of decentralized finance (DeFi). Instead of booking the order under centralized system, you have straight peer-to-peer trades via Automated Market Makers (AMM). AMMs like Uniswap and Curve have actually been developed to reduce the friction of liquidity provisioning. Nevertheless, they still experience impermanent loss, deadweight loss, compartmentalization of market liquidity, in addition to suboptimal operation in volatile environments. This paper explains an RL-based algorithm that can regulate liquidity and flexible market-making in DEXs. RL agents has been trained to maximize capital allowance, liquidity rebalancing, and spread adjusting in live trading information from SushiSwap and Uniswap in addition to synthetically created cardiovascular test. DQN, PPO, and A3C are three RL algorithms that we have actually contrasted versus constant-product AMM standards. With risk-adjusted returns of as much as 1.6 vs. 0.9, an impermanent loss reduction of 15-20%, and test-set revenues of 12.5 -15.7% vs. 8, it seems that RL-poured method is considerably much better. The stability and scalability of RL models under different swimming pool dimensions and volatility regimes are further made certain by level of sensitivity analysis. Actually, PPO is the most effective in high-volatility circumstances, DQN assembles more quickly in moderate scenarios, and A3C offers a trade-off. Our results open up the design of flexible monetary AI systems and are right away appropriate to enhancing liquidity rewards, stability, and performance in DeFi. The result of the experiment shows that RL can be made use of to improve the rationality of liquidity administration in DEXs. The integration of administration systems right into multi-agent RL and the gas-efficient migration of these algorithms from off-chain to on-chain ought to be the primary tasks of future research study.
Few studies examine whether the gap-filling effect, whereby the maturity structure of local government debt shapes corporate debt maturity, also holds in emerging, bank-dominated economies. Using data on Chinese local government financing vehicle (LGFV) bonds from 2009 to 2023, this study examines how the maturity structure of local government debt influences that of corporate debt. The results reveal a pronounced gap-filling effect, whereby longer local government debt maturities systematically crowd out long-term credit resources, raise corporate financing costs, and prompt firms to shorten their debt maturities. This effect is more salient during economic downturns and when local government debt levels are elevated. Heterogeneity analysis shows substantial variation in the gap-filling effect across regions, industries, and firm characteristics. In addition, firms with shorter debt maturities are found to face higher financial risks. This study contributes by providing policy evidence for fiscally decentralized emerging markets: local government maturity choices transmit to firms’ financing structure, implying that local debt management is instrumental for financial stability.
Purpose This paper reviews the application of game theory in finance, focusing on its role in modeling strategic interactions among market participants. It synthesizes classical models such as Nash equilibrium and signaling games while integrating emerging themes including behavioral finance, sustainability-linked decisions, decentralized finance (DeFi) and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven agents. The study aims to highlight how game-theoretic frameworks inform financial decision-making, market design and governance and to identify conceptual gaps and future research directions. Design/methodology/approach The study employs a systematic literature review following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses protocol, complemented by bibliometric mapping using VOSviewer. It analyzes 78 peer-reviewed articles published between 2000 and 2025 across five finance domains: asset pricing, corporate finance, investment strategies, financial markets and behavioral finance. Conceptual frameworks and taxonomies are developed to categorize game-theoretic models by strategic orientation and information structure, offering a structured synthesis of theoretical advancements and practical applications. Findings Game theory enhances understanding of strategic behavior in finance, particularly under conditions of asymmetric information and market complexity. Key findings include the relevance of signaling games in initial public offerings pricing, repeated games in environmental, social and governance commitments and mechanism design in DeFi governance. The review identifies gaps in behavioral integration, empirical validation and modeling of decentralized ecosystems. It proposes future research directions involving multi-agent learning, adaptive mechanism design and sustainability-linked financial strategies. Research limitations/implications The review is limited by its focus on published literature and may exclude emerging models in unpublished or proprietary research. Empirical validation of proposed frameworks remains a future research priority. Practical implications The paper offers actionable insights for regulators, investors and policymakers by applying game-theoretic tools to systemic risk management, portfolio allocation and financial regulation in digitized markets. Originality/value This study provides a novel synthesis of game theory’s evolution in finance, introducing conceptual frameworks that integrate behavioral, technological and sustainability-linked dimensions.
Purpose This synthesis paper consolidates expert analyses on the persistent challenges and emerging opportunities in disaster risk reduction (DRR) financing and governance, with a focus on Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). It critiques current paradigms and proposes pathways to align DRR with sustainable development goals. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on contributions from nine DRR specialists, the study evaluates four thematic areas: (1) conceptual and governance barriers, (2) data gaps and analytical limitations, (3) financing mechanisms and (4) DRR-climate adaptation synergies. Findings Key challenges include sectoral silos that isolate DRR from development planning, perpetuating reactive over proactive risk management; data disparities, with hazard-focused metrics overshadowing vulnerability analysis and local-scale risk drivers; financing imbalances, where dedicated DRR funds and risk-transfer instruments (e.g. insurance) often neglect root-cause vulnerability reduction and missed synergies between DRR and climate adaptation, exacerbated by institutional fragmentation and “additionality” constraints in climate finance. Notable progress includes increased Ministry of Finance engagement and decentralized resilience models (e.g. social protection schemes). Originality/value This paper uniquely synthesizes multidisciplinary critiques to advocate for integrated governance that embeds DRR in sectoral development agendas; holistic financing combining corrective, prospective and compensatory measures and systemic risk analytics bridging climate adaptation and DRR.
We explore the role of auditor reputation in driving the value of smart contract audits (SCAs) within the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. Given the lack of regulatory oversight and the risk of cybersecurity breaches against the protocols comprising the DeFi ecosystem, a marketplace has emerged for voluntary on-demand assurance to identify vulnerabilities in smart contracts’ coded logic. After documenting that market participants value SCAs and exploring the protocol attributes associated with the demand for smart contract audits, we show that auditor reputation can be established through both advertising (i.e., engagement on Twitter) and the delivery of a high-quality audit, which significantly shape the extent to which an SCA is valued. Additional analyses suggest that the value of an SCA is maximized when both high advertising and high audit quality are present, highlighting the complementary role of these two factors in enhancing auditor reputation. Furthermore, we find that events conceivably damaging the reputation of the auditor (i.e., breaches of protocols recently audited) generate a negative spillover to the auditor’s other recent clients. Overall, our study provides novel insights about the role of auditor reputation in emerging audit markets. This paper was accepted by Suraj Srinivasan, accounting. Supplemental Material: The online appendices and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.02245 .
We analyze 15,097 blocks proposed for inclusion in Ethereum's blockchain over an eight-minute window on December 3, 2024, during which 38 blocks were added to the chain. We classify transactions as exclusive -- appearing only in blocks from a single builder -- or private -- absent from the public mempool but included in blocks from multiple builders. We find that, depending on the methodology, exclusive transactions account for between 77.2% and 84% of the total fees paid by transactions in winning blocks. Moreover, we show that exclusivity cannot be fully attributed to persistent relationships between senders and builders: only between 7% and 8.4% of all on-chain exclusive transaction value originates from senders who route exclusively to one builder. Finally, we observe that transaction exclusivity is dynamic. Some transactions are exclusive at the start of a bidding cycle but later appear in blocks from multiple builders. Other transactions remain exclusive to a losing builder for two or three cycles before appearing in the public mempool. These transactions are therefore delayed and then exposed to potential attacks.
Given Vietnam's current anticorruption campaign and its distinctive context of decentralized governance and public sector dominance, this paper investigates how anticorruption efforts affect corporate investment behaviour during 2006 and 2019. Using a novel text-based measure of anticorruption and comprehensive firm-level datasets, we uncover a consistent pattern that firms tend to delay investments in response to heightened uncertainty triggered by anticorruption activities. This strategic hesitation reflects a rational response to avoid potential regulatory and political uncertainty, and holds across a wide range of robustness checks, including alternative model specifications, variable definitions, and advanced estimation techniques such as system GMM and entropy balancing. Our findings also reveal that anticorruption campaigns significantly reduce informal business costs—particularly bribery, thus highlighting institutional improvements and a more transparent business environment. Notably, while public sector investment efficiency improves under the campaign, private firms show no significant efficiency gains, underscoring the asymmetry in how reforms affect different ownership structures. By bridging institutional reform with corporate finance, the study offers new insights into the channels through which anticorruption influences firm decision-making, governance, and political strategy. This research fills a critical gap in the literature, demonstrating that anticorruption is not merely a legal or ethical issue, but a transformative force in corporate investment dynamics.
The swift advancement of technology has transformed numerous sectors, particularly the financial services business, with Decentralised Finance (DeFi) emerging as a notable disruptor. To guarantee the sustained development and integration of DeFi, it is necessary to investigate and comprehend the emerging trends in this field. This study presents a bibliometric analysis of 181 Decentralized Finance articles published from 2010 to 2024 in the Scopus database The data were examined and illustrated utilising the VoS viewer platform and R software, yielding both descriptive and visual insights. Authored by 503 researchers across 418 universities, these works span 129 journals and cite 10,428 references. Publications show an annual growth rate of 29.2 %, with 2024 exhibiting unprecedented output. Frontiers in Blockchain leads with six publications, followed by the Journal of Risk and Financial Management. New Zealand tops the citation rankings, led by Auckland University with 338 citations. Bellavitis C. and Chen Y. are the most prolific authors each with 338 citations. The cluster analysis identifies six thematic areas, offering insights into various aspects of decentralized finance. This study offers critical insights for academics, policymakers, and industry practitioners by mapping DeFi's transition from conventional financial systems to decentralized ecosystems. The findings illuminate research gaps, propose future research avenues, and underscore the necessity of developing policies and cyber hygiene protocols to mitigate the risks of decentralized finance. This work thus serves as a valuable resource for advancing the discourse on DeFi and its implications for financial innovation.
The effect of competitive pressure on ESG may diverge. On the one hand, when competitive pressure increases, firms have incentives to increase moral capital by fulfilling ESG to hedge against risks, on the other hand, the decline in firm performance due to competition may weaken firms' ability to fulfill ESG. Research on this issue has important theoretical and practical significance. Based on data from Chinese listed companies from 2010 to 2022, we used business similarity as a proxy for competitive pressure and find it significantly improves corporate ESG performance, i.e., the risk hedging effect of ESG dominates. Corporate financing constraints negatively moderate this effect. The ability of firms to transfer risk increases as their business becomes more decentralized, which in turn weakens this effect. Conversely, when firms have more concentrated sales, their ability to transfer risk diminishes, amplifying this effect. Our study explores the measure of competitive pressure and business similarity, also expands the research on the impact of business characteristics on the non-economic consequences of firms and ESG motivations.