Abstract:
The 2016 Panama Papers leak tightened regulatory enforcement around money laundering and offshore banking. We investigate whether the diversion of foreign aid in developing countries led to a shift to cryptocurrency as an alternative laundering platform. We develop a disbursement-timed forensic measure of cryptocurrency activity, combining on-chain Bitcoin transactions and wallet creation, off-chain exchange records, and IP-linked web traffic, and apply it to World Bank aid disbursements covering $238 billion across the 93 recipient countries in our estimation sample during 2018-2024. Exploiting the administrative timing of aid tranche arrivals, we find sharp, short-lived surges of crypto activity at the disbursement month, driven mainly by anonymous and newly created wallets on both tax-haven and mainstream exchanges. Blockchain forensics reveal patterns consistent with the placement, layering, and integration sequence of conventional money laundering. We estimate an implied leakage of 2 to 6 cents per aid dollar, which amounts to roughly 1.7 to 4.3 billion dollars of aid diversion across the tranche arrivals we study. Capture carries no funding penalty: the four sectors where we detect it, Transport, Water and Sanitation, Social Protection, and Governance, still absorb half of subsequent World Bank funding. Cryptocurrency facilitates aid diversion, but its transparent ledgers also leave forensic traces that may help detect and recover diverted funds.

AFA (2027), ABFER (2026), MFA (2026), FMA (2026), 38th Australasian Finance and Banking Conference (2025)

Abstract:
Exploiting an exogenous tax reporting shock imposed on cryptocurrency gains and millions of DeFi transactions, we identify a borrow up, trade down strategy whereby U.S. traders reduce taxable trading and increase borrowing of the same tokens to monetize their needs and defer tax payment. This substitution effect is particularly pronounced among borrowers with higher loan-to-value ratios and higher returns. We show that when adopted at scale, tax considerations reduce trading activity and market depth, generating what we term tax-planning-induced illiquidity. We establish a causal link between this illiquidity and heightened credit risk. A one-standard-deviation increase in tax-induced illiquidity more than doubles the value of defaulted loans, with broader implications for financial stability in decentralized lending markets. Results are robust to multiple checks, including highly tax-sensitive borrowers, validation against tax-awareness periods, and alternative proxies for U.S. traders.

AFA PhD Session (2026); ABR-Fudan Conference (2025); IMF Workshop in Digital Money and Taxation (2025)*; Hawai'i Accounting Research Conference (2025)*; Tokenomics Conference (2024)*; Waseda University Workshop on the Economics of Technology and Decentralization*; NUS; Cornell-Tsinghua Summer Finance Institute*; IESE Barcelona Tax Conference*; IC3 Blockchain Camp at Cornell Tech*; Finance and Accounting Annual Research Symposium*; Research Symposium on Finance and Economics*; Bank of Finland; European Systemic Risk Board*; Swiss National Bank Conference on Cryptoassets and Financial Innovation*; Euroasia Conference*; Hong Kong University Summer Conference*; Bank of Japan*; FeAT International Conference on AI*; Tsinghua University (SEM and PBC, 2024); Singapore FinTech Festival*; 14th FMCG Conference*; AI Global Finance Research Conference (Ho Chi Minh City, 2023).

Abstract:
This paper studies the consequences of privacy regulation by exploiting Google's 2019 data-access restriction for a major Indian FinTech lender. We document a key trade-off of privacy regulation in digital credit markets: strengthened privacy protections raise loan applications, consistent with higher demand, yet induce tighter screening, reflecting an overall contraction in credit supply. This credit contraction disproportionately excludes economically and socially marginalized applicants. Linking to economy-wide credit bureau records, we quantify the "FinTech ladder effect" whereby initial digital credit access serves as a gateway to broader formal credit. Privacy-induced rejection reduces the probability of obtaining any formal credit by 13.7 percentage points even four years later. Using a structural model, we decompose the welfare effects of privacy regulation and show that the regulation generates a 0.23-0.60% increase in consumer surplus while reducing lender profits by 20-23%.

EFA (2026), WEFIDEV-RFS-CEPR (2026)*, MFA (2026)*

Abstract:
This paper studies how digital technologies alter household responsiveness to income shocks by increasing the salience of consumption. I evaluate a government-led intervention in Singapore that provides real-time energy usage feedback through a mobile app. Using proprietary banking transaction data and a staggered rollout design, I find that treated households reduce utility payments by approximately $21 per month. This reduction is not driven by price changes or liquidity constraints but by increased cognitive attention to consumption. The intervention also produces behavioral spillovers: households reduce spending on paper goods, carbon-intensive foods, and taxi rides. Untreated residents living near treated areas exhibit similar changes, suggesting that salience effects diffuse spatially. These findings challenge the Permanent Income Hypothesis by showing that visibility increases short-run consumption elasticity. The results have implications for monetary and fiscal policy design. Digital salience can raise marginal propensities to consume, especially among liquidity-constrained households, and may strengthen policy transmission in heterogeneous-agent macroeconomic models.

CAERE (2026), AEA PhD Session (2026), 38th Australasian Finance and Banking Conference (2025)

Abstract:
We study the direct and spillover effects of a low-cost socio-emotional intervention: 15-minute audio bedtime stories broadcast in the dormitories of 63 randomly assigned rural Chinese primary schools. Only boarders are directly exposed; day students share their classrooms. Treated boarders show modest noncognitive gains, while untreated day students gain more, including 0.16 standard deviations in self-esteem by 2017. The spillover concentrates among left-behind children of migrant parents and does not require a pre-existing friendship with a treated boarder. It is accompanied by shifts in friendship composition and by improvements in peer climate, school belonging, and perceived teacher support.

Chinese Economist Society 2026 (Chengdu)*, RES 2025 (Birmingham)*, Janeway Institute PhD Workshop 2025 (Cambridge)*, SOLE 2024 (Oregon)*, EAYE 2024 (Paris)*