Publications

Ayesu, E. K., & Asaana, C. A. (2023). Global shipping and climate change impacts in Africa: the role of international trade. Journal of Shipping and Trade, 8(1), 19. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41072-023-00149-6


Sakyi, D., Asaana, C. A., & Ayesu, E. K. (2022). How does quality of institutions affect the impact of technology adoption on export performance in Africa? The Journal of International Trade & Economic Development, 1-30. https://doi.org/10.1080/09638199.2022.2136737 

 

Asaana, C. A., & Sakyi, D. (2021). Empirical analysis of demand for imports in Sub-Saharan Africa. The International Trade Journal, 35(4), 360-382.  https://doi.org/10.1080/08853908.2020.1832938 






                          Working Papers


Macro Drivers of Cryptocurrency Adoption: A Cross-Country Perspective


(Job Market Paper)

We uncover the macroeconomic and financial drivers of cryptocurrency adoption and usage from a global perspective. Utilising data on cryptocurrency adoption from 118 countries, we examine the empirical relevance of a wide set of intuitively plausible macro-financial and economic variables in enabling cryptocurrency adoption. We identify decentralised finance (DeFi), inflation volatility, GDP per capita and security fragility as the critical drivers of global cryptocurrency adoption, with DeFi having the largest impact. These results are robust to an instrumental variables analysis, allowing for possible endogeneity of DeFi and alternative measures of inflation and GDP volatility. We also find significant income and regional heterogeneity in cryptocurrency adoption.  

                                            Available upon request



Households’ Crypto Asset Market Participation with Vikas Kakkar                                                                           

We document the factors that affect households’ decisions to participate in the crypto assets market. Using United States households’ survey data from the 2021 National Financial Capability Study (NFCS), we find that households with high subjective financial knowledge, high digital literacy, low risk aversion and high fraud aversion are associated with a higher probability of participating in the crypto asset market. In contrast, we find that households’ level of objective financial knowledge does not significantly impact their decisions to invest in crypto assets. We also obtain evidence of behavioural biases (overconfidence and myopic behaviour) in the US crypto asset market. 

This paper has received “The Best Summer Paper Award to Junior PhD Students” from the Department of Economics and Finance, City University of Hong Kong. 




Bridging the MSME Financing Gap with Fintech Credit with Vikas Kakkar                                                                           

In this paper, we examine the role of fintech credit in MSME financing using MSME financing gap data across 120 developing countries, and SME contracted bank loan data from OECD countries spanning from 2013 to 2019. We document that fintech credit reduces the MSME financing gap by 20 percentage points in developing countries. We show that technology and innovations mediate the effect of fintech credit on the MSME financing gap. Furthermore, we find that fintech credit substitutes for only short-term bank credit to SMEs, but not long-term credit.