Annual Conference

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Tech, Digital Markets and AI

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May 2026

Data Scientists on Wall Street

Ling CEN, Bing HAN, Yanru HAN, Chanik JO
Financial institutions have significantly increased their recruitment of data scientists in the last two decades. We find that the number of data scientists employed by financial institutions causally affects their ability to earn abnormal profits. Data scientists’ ability to generate abnormal pro...
Keywords: Data Scientists, Information Competition, Price Informativeness, Institutional Investors
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Annual Conference

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Tech, Digital Markets and AI

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May 2026

AI as "Co-founder": GenAI for Entrepreneurship

Junhui CAI, Xian GU, Liugang SHENG, Mengjia XIA, Linda ZHAO, Wu ZHU
This paper studies whether, how, and for whom generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) facilitates firm creation.Our identification strategy exploits the November 2022 release of ChatGPT as a global shock that lowered start-up costs and leverages variations across geo-coded grids with differential...
Keywords: Generative AI, Entrepreneurship, firm entry, Human capital, Technological Change, Spatial Economics
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Annual Conference

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Tech, Digital Markets and AI

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May 2026

The Buy Now Pay Later Divide: Merchant Heterogeneity and Market Structure

Shashwat ALOK, Pulak GHOSH, Ankit KALDA, Chirasree MITRA
We examine who benefits from Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) services and how these services shape market structure. Using novel transaction-level data from a large fintech lender and a shift-share instrumental variable, we find that BNPL adoption increases revenue growth of small, credit-constrained merch...
Keywords: Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), Merchant adoption, Fintech, Market concentration, Small businesses, Financial inclusion
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Annual Conference

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Tech, Digital Markets and AI

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May 2026

Predictive Crypto Crashes and Asset Pricing Implications: An Inelastic Market Perspective

Jennifer Jie LI, Li LIAO, Siyuan YANG, Hong ZHANG
Frequent and large-scale crashes are hallmarks of cryptocurrencies. We show that these crashes are predictable: assets experiencing large price swings subsequently exhibit significantly negative risk-adjusted returns at horizons up to eight weeks. These patterns are consistent with a framework featu...
Keywords: Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Slow-moving capital, Crashes, Momentum, FinTech, Inelastic Market
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Annual Conference

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Tech, Digital Markets and AI

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May 2026

Crypto Capture of Foreign Aid

Sumit AGARWAL, Peiyi JIN, Eswar PRASAD, Daniel RABETTI
This paper investigates whether cryptocurrencies have become a new conduit for laundering diverted foreign aid. Using World Bank aid disbursement data from 2018 to 2024, linked with forensically tagged on-chain Bitcoin transactions and off-chain exchange activity, we document systematic surges in cr...
Keywords: Foreign aid, money laundering, tax haven, cryptocurrency, blockchain forensics
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