Nir Chemaya

Biography

Nir Chemaya is a PhD Candidate in Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He focuses on researching Finance and Behavioral and Experimental Economics. Nir is particularly interested in exploring innovations in the Fintech markets, such as blockchain and Decentralized Finance (DeFi), and agents' interactions with those technologies. In this spirit, Nir’s job market paper estimates traders' preferences for blockchain security from a big trading data set of over 19M transactions from Decentralized Exchange (DEX) platforms. Using empirical or experimental data and applying traditional economic models and rigorous analysis, Nir examines and unpacks current hypotheses about trends in Blockchain and DeFi.

In addition to his research, Nir is actively involved in teaching and academic service. Nir was one of the lead organizers of the Economic Science Association 2022 North American conference in Santa Barbara in November 2022 and is currently one of the leaders of the UCSB-ECON DeFi Seminar, which is a graduate-student-led seminar series sponsored by Uniswap. In addition, he has been the head teaching assistant or teaching assistant for courses in microeconomics, macroeconomics, and other specialized topics at UC Santa Barbara. He holds Bachelor and Master degrees in Economics from Ben Gurion University in Israel.

Job Market Paper Abstract

"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.