About me

Welcome! I am an associate professor of finance in the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. I research and teach financial technology, crypto, and corporate finance. I also run the UT Blockchain Initiative on campus, and the Fintech Research Lab. Recently, I was a member of the State of Texas Work Group on Blockchain Matters (2021), and on academic leave as the chief economist of the Coinbase Institute (2022-2023).

I earned my MBA and PhD in Finance at UCLA-Anderson, and my BS/MS in Electrical Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. My academic work has been published in top finance journals, including the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Management Science.

News: Sep 2025 - I just released the new paper ``No Country for Dirty Money? The Economic Footprint of Anti-Money Laundering Standards.’‘, co-authored with Eric Lee and Tarik Roukny. We find that as countries go through an AML examination by FATF, cross-border trade goes down, FDI increases, ML detection goes up, and there is no significant impact on crime. Check it out.