Yican Liu

How cryptocurrencies from the cyberspace influence household finance and the real world? We investigate the economic consequences of cryptocurrency adoption by the main street enabled by crypto ATM installation. Using a unique, hand-collected dataset, we identify a causal relationship between the staggered rollout of crypto ATMs and regions' increased crypto activity and financial participation, as well as an associated increase in local cybercrime and financial frauds. Our findings are especially pronounced on platforms facilitating monetary transactions and in regions with limited banking infrastructure, indicating that crypto ATMs function as shadow intermediaries primarily for unbanked and low-income households. A back-of-the envelope estimate suggests a net welfare gain, but with unequal distribution. Overall, our findings reveal that the liberalized and democratized nature of cryptocurrency exerts a multifaceted impact on the real economy, disrupting traditional financial systems by expanding participation in both the crypto and stock markets, while simultaneously contributing to a rise in cybercrime as an unintended consequence.

We quantify the value of consumer data and privacy preferences using stock and option market reactions to major data protection regulations. Standard event-study methods substantially understate negative valuation effects on app-intensive firms. Option-based approaches estimate average abnormal returns of about 7 percent, corresponding to market capitalization losses of $0.20 trillion for GDPR, $0.32 trillion for CCPA, and $0.40 trillion for DSLC. We further exploit changes in mobile-app privacy permissions to value specific digital footprints, finding that fintech payment permissions account for 1.3 percent of firm value. Together, this evidence underscores the importance of consumer data for technology firm valuation.

As individual investors increasingly rely on smartphones for their daily lives, we construct a measure of real-time investor sentiment based on global amusement app downloads. We find that a one-standard-deviation increase in the last four-week amusement app downloads predicts a 47 bps increase in stock market returns in the next four weeks. We also observe a 31 bps reversal in another four weeks. Amusement app downloads are positively related to subsequent stock trading app downloads, suggesting that investor sentiment drives new stock market participation. Overall, we show that digital footprint in app downloads predicts global market returns via investor sentiment.

Technological change can transform economies, generating both opportunities and disruptions that carry important political and policy consequences. Yet little is known about how people respond politically to new technologies at an early stage, when their eventual impacts remain uncertain. We study this question in the context of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) through randomized online experiments in five Latin American countries with a total of 12,000 participants. Participants are asked to perform a series of office-related tasks with or without access to a GenAI-powered assistant and then complete a survey on their beliefs about GenAI's potential influence and their preferences across a range of policy areas. To identify how these policy preferences are shaped by the beliefs individuals form, we implement an additional information treatment that experimentally manipulates perceptions of GenAI's potential impacts. Overall, the project seeks to shed light on how people respond to novel technologies whose effects are uncertain and for which they have no prior experience—particularly in developing countries that may be more vulnerable to such disruptions.