Job Market Practice Talk: Nir Chemaya, University of California, Santa Barbara (please note the earlier time!)

Speaker

Nir Chemaya, University of California, Santa Barbara

Biography

Nir is currently a Ph.D. Student in the Department of Economics at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB). His research interests include macroeconomics, blockchain, decentralized finance (DeFi), and experimental and behavioral economics.

Before starting at UCSB, he received a BA and MA in Economics from Ben Gurion University.

Event Details

Paper: Estimating Investor Preferences for Blockchain Security

The use of decentralized exchange (DEX) platforms has been growing in the last few years. New Layer 2 (L2) blockchain alternatives provide better scalability and lower fees than the Ethereum blockchain (L1), but the security of L2 relative to L1 is unclear and difficult to identify. Using a structural model and a novel and comprehensive data set, we estimate investors' preferences for blockchain security on two main L2 networks, Polygon and Optimism. We find that traders anticipate an 0.68% (3.29%) chance of losing the transaction value when trading on Polygon (Optimism) compared to L1, a considerable amount compared to the (0.01%-0.3%) transaction fee charged on each trade.


Zoom link for the talk:
https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/8850919855