New homepage: sergeykovbasyuk.com 

Assistant Professor of Finance, New Economic School
Email: skovbasyuk@gmail.com · Google Scholar · CV (PDF)

Academic positions

• Assistant Professor of Finance, New Economic School — 2019–present

• Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance, Rome — 2011–2019

• CREST — Center for Research in Economics and Statistics, Paris — 2010–2011

Education

• Ph.D., Economics, Toulouse School of Economics — 2011

• M.A., Economics, New Economic School — 2006

• M.Sc., Applied Physics and Mathematics, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology — 2006

Research

Works on finance, economics of information and fintech. His research concerns the role of information in financial markets, on marketplaces and in the economy at large, the diffusion of information and its regulation, and the role of payment systems and of private and public digital currencies, including cryptocurrencies.

Publications

Memory and Markets (with Giancarlo Spagnolo)
Review of Economic Studies, 91(3), 2024, pp. 1775–1806
Journal · SSRN · Google Scholar
Short summary: Information intermediaries should not disclose all past records about market participants: welfare is maximized with short positive records and long but bounded negative records. 

Advertising Arbitrage (with Marco Pagano)
Review of Finance, 26(4), 2022, pp. 799–827
Journal · SSRN · Google Scholar
Short summary: Arbitrageurs who publicize new information about their targets optimally concentrate their portfolios and advertising on few targets, and this concentration may be inefficient. 

Working papers

Seller-paid Ratings
previously “Optimal Certification Design”
Short summary: When a seller pays the rating agency and payments are not transparent, ratings are endogenously coarse; with transparent payments, perfectly informative ratings become feasible. 

Is There Skill in the Game? Institutional IPO Allocations (with David Brown and Tamara Nefedova)
previously “On the Origin of IPO Profits”
NES Working Paper
Short summary: Information explains most of the variation in institutional investors’ IPO profits; commissions and post-IPO trading affect who gets allocations, but not the returns. 

Limited Records and Credit Cycles (with Artem Larinsky and Giancarlo Spagnolo)
Short summary: When a credit bureau keeps borrowers’ records only for a limited time, lending to borrowers with empty records switches on and off, generating endogenous credit cycles tied to record retention limits. 

Project Financing with a Native (Crypto)currency
Short summary: A platform’s internal currency works as an interest-free loan that expands its borrowing capacity, but widespread use of such currencies may displace fiat money and fuel inflation. 

Wisdom of the Crowd
Short summary: Venture capitalists with limited, correlated information herd into promising fields, so the number of investors in a field becomes a public quality signal — and firms from such fields get higher IPO valuations. 

Awards

IQAM Runner-up Award for the best investment paper published in the Review of Finance, European Finance Association Meeting (Amsterdam, 2023), for “Advertising Arbitrage” with Marco Pagano.

Teaching

Modern Technologies in Finance, Foundations of Finance, FinTech, Corporate Finance and Microeconomics II at the New Economic School; Introduction to Finance at MIPT.