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
- March 2026 — New working paper: "Automated Market Making with Continuity: Liquidity, Price Discovery, and Adverse Selection" (with T. George and M. Khoja). We develop a model of Constant-Product Automated Market Makers (CPAMMs) showing that equilibrium prices are invariant to liquidity supply, and derive a closed-form measure of adverse selection costs. We validate the theory using Uniswap V2 data.
- December 2025 — "Adverse Selection in Corporate Loan Markets" (with M. Beyhaghi and G. Weitzner) is published in the Journal of Finance.
- September 2025— New working paper: "No Country for Dirty Money? The Economic Footprint of Anti-Money Laundering Standards" (with E. Lee and T. 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.