Knowledge that Transforms

This paper surveys the growing empirical literature on decentralized finance (DeFi), emphasizing how protocol design and incentive structures shape economic outcomes in blockchain-based financial systems. We review evidence on tokens, decentralized exchanges, lending platforms, yield farming, derivatives, governance, infrastructure, and regulation. Across these domains, research highlights mechanisms of liquidity provision, price discovery, leverage, systemic fragility, and investor behavior, as well as vulnerabilities stemming from arbitrage frictions, liquidation dynamics, and maximal extractable value. We also examine the roles of audits, oracle networks, settlement mechanisms, and transparency tools in substituting for traditional oversight. The findings indicate that DeFi replicates many functions of traditional finance while introducing new risks linked to pseudonymity, smart contracts, and composability. The survey concludes by outlining open questions for research and policy on market efficiency, governance, systemic risk, and long-term sustainability.

We find that the expected contribution of new CEO's experience to firm value depends on the degree of managerial challenge faced in the hiring firm. We identify two firm dimensions of such challenge: 1) firm complexity and 2) prior poor performance of the firm. Using a multi-industry 15-year sample of 1095 newly appointed CEOs of U.S. public firms, we find that CEO's experience benefits investors only when the firm is complex and/or struggling. The more complexity or performance challenge the firm is facing, the greater is the positive effect of CEO generalist experience on shareholder value.

Recent diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives have resulted in significant board refreshment, specifically in the characteristics and qualities of board members across various dimensions. To facilitate these changes, U.S. boardrooms are increasingly appointing inexperienced rookie directors. Our findings indicate that rookie refreshment enhances board monitoring effectiveness, as evidenced by improved CEO turnover–performance sensitivity, better CEO incentives, and higher earnings quality. While rookie refreshment does not enhance the board's advising capacity, it does not hinder it either. These findings challenge DEI critics who argue that rookie appointments result in inefficient firm-director matching, thereby hampering corporate governance. Moreover, we show that boards continue to benefit from seasoned director refreshment to improve advising effectiveness, as reflected in firms' investment efficiency and acquisition activities and performance. Overall, we posit that rookie directors enhance board effectiveness when their presence refreshes the board's composition relative to its prior attributes.

Leveraging the China Securities Regulatory Commission’s annual random inspection exercise as a quasi-natural experiment, we document that the risk scrutiny of preventive regulatory enforcement creates regulatory uncertainty about inspected firms to business partners, leading them to reduce the provision of trade credit. Reduced access to trade credit is more pronounced for firms with weak bargaining power, high opacity, or low financial resilience. Reduced access is also evident in both ‘compliant’ and non-compliant firms, though the reduction gradually subsides as uncertainty dissipates in different ways for the two types of inspected firms. Our findings uncover an important unintended effect of preventive regulation and have implications for policy making.

I investigate how to best measure firms' climate transition risk. Therefore, I gather a new dataset of firm-level climate transition risk metrics including reported EU taxonomy alignments of capex and revenues as well as emission intensities, E-scores from Refinitiv and MSCI, The Refinitiv Business Classification (TRBC), and text-based metrics. I find a strong divergence in transition risk metrics for companies. Thus, depending on the transition risk metric – a portfolio's transition risk profile will differ substantially. To evaluate the transition risk metrics, I measure the return sensitivity of nine brown and green portfolios– each constructed using a specific firm-level transition risk metric – to market-wide news indices that track transition risk shocks: the higher the sensitivity, the more effective the transition risk proxy. For green portfolios, I find that taxonomy and TRBC portfolios react most strongly to climate transition risk shocks. Forward-looking metrics seem to be particularly useful. For brown portfolios, only the MSCI E-score portfolio reacts significantly negative to transition risk shocks. The findings are robust across different world regions, different weighting and sampling methodologies and in an event-study setting. I conclude that markets currently price the upside risk for green firms stronger than the downside risk for brown firms.

We examine the effects of cross-border supervisory arbitrage on corporate lending and firm performance. We show that subsidiaries of banking groups improve loan conditions for firms when the group’s opportunities to take risks in other countries are curbed. The expansion in lending is targeted towards firms of higher quality and firms that the group is already familiar with. The improved lending conditions have positive real effects, allowing recipient firms to increase capital spending and leading to higher profits. Taken together, our results suggest that there can be benefits for firms in countries that receive lending inflows due to the supervisory arbitrage.