Research

Publications

Biodiversity and Local Asset Values, 2025, with Jess Cornaggia, Peter Iliev, and Jennifer Liang

• Review of Finance, forthcoming

Working Papers

Student Debt and the Cinderella Effect, with Jess Cornaggia, Kimberly Cornaggia, and Han Xia

Unexpected intercollegiate athletic success generates a variety of changes at universities -- including increased salience and status of sports-oriented activities among students, known colloquially as the "Cinderella effect". By linking data on athletic contest outcomes, betting lines, student debt default rates, and post-college earnings data, we find that Cinderella events disrupt human capital development among incumbent students and adversely affect their financial outcomes. Following such events, treated students exhibit higher default rates and lower earnings. This effect strengthens with treatment exposure (results are larger for freshmen than seniors) and is concentrated in low-ranked universities. These institutions show no changes in revenues or expenditures, suggesting that resource-driven explanations are unlikely to be the primary driver. In contrast, students at high-ranked universities have marginally lower default rates and higher earnings, as these schools receive more applications, increase selectivity, and have marginally higher revenues and expenditures. Overall, our results suggest that athletic success shifts students' preferences away from academic focus. More broadly, our results show that university environment affects human capital development, as distinct from selection effects that reflect assortive matching between students and universities. 

Presentations: 2023 Financial Research Association (Early Ideas Presentation)*, 2024 Boulder Summer Conference on Consumer Financial Decision Making (Poster Session), 2026 MFA Annual Meeting

Does DeFi Democratize Access to Financial Services?

Blockchain-based decentralized Finance (DeFi) aims to promote financial inclusion by removing centralized intermediaries and providing direct services to users. This paper investigates whether Decentralized Financial (DeFi) lending markets, one of the largest DeFi applications, provide equal access. DeFi lending operates similarly to margin lending or repo transactions. Most borrowers use cryptocurrencies as collateral to borrow stablecoins, which are cryptocurrencies pegged to the US dollar. Using data at the account level, I find that highly leveraged borrowers who pledge low collateral relative to their loan amounts are constrained by collateral requirements. After platforms relax collateral requirements, highly leveraged borrowers increase borrowing and leverage further. Overall, this paper suggests that stringent collateral requirements in DeFi lending restrict access to borrowers who are already asset-rich.

Presentations: Penn State University, 2024 INFORMS, 2024 FMA Annual Meeting (Special Presentations - Rising Stars of Fintech), Junior Academic Research Seminars, University of Sydney Business Financing and Banking Research Workshop, 2024 CBER Ph.D. Symposium, UCSB ECON DeFi Seminar 

An Anatomy of Cryptocurrency Sentiment, with Mehmet Canayaz, Charles Cao, Zongbo Huang and Giang Nguyen

In this paper, we investigate the impact of market sentiment on cryptocurrency returns. To accomplish this, we use a novel dataset that captures a multitude of attitudes, moods, and emotions extracted from a vast amount of news and social media content. Our findings indicate that social media sentiment significantly predicts crypto returns, while sentiment from news media does not. Additionally, we observe that fundamental events play a role in shaping sentiment, but market exuberance---sentiment unrelated to fundamental events---is a strong and robust predictor of returns. Furthermore, we find that market exuberance is positively related to momentum return but does not positively predict volatility. This suggests that sentiment influences returns through price perception and demand shocks rather than the risk premium channel. Overall, our research highlights the importance of sentiment in understanding and predicting cryptocurrency market dynamics. 

Presentations: Penn State University, 2023 CMU-PSU-Pitt Finance Conference, 2023 Early Career Women in Finance Conference, 2023 FMA Annual Meeting, 2024 EasternFA Annual Meeting, CIREQ-CMP Econometrics Conference*, 2024 WFA Meeting, 2025 MFA Annual Meeting, 38th Australasian Finance and Banking Conference

Media: Les Affaires, COINTELEGRAPH.COM, BitcoinInsider.org, Crypto News Flash, Blockworks 

Work in Progress 

Cryptomining and Local Economy, with Liu Ee Chia

Presentations: 2024 FMA Annual Meeting (New Ideas Session)

Grant: Smeal Small Research Grant Fall 2024

​(* Presented by coauthors)