NWO Research Talent grant for Shihao Yu
MPhil student Shihao Yu has been awarded a NWO Research Talent grant to fund a PhD project on ‘Social costs and benefits of financial technology (FinTech)’. The project will be supervised by research fellow Albert J. Menkveld. Yu will be joining the microstructure group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in September. 28 of the 68 full proposals submitted were accepted in the 2017 round.
Social costs and benefits of financial technology (FinTech)
Financial Technology or ‘FinTech’ has fundamentally changed how financial institutions provide services to their clients. In some cases, computers have replaced people entirely (e.g. stock markets and traders). These drastic changes pose significant challenges for everyone: end users (clients), intermediaries and academics are all looking for the most efficient and ‘fairest’ market structure. In this project, Shihao is focusing on one phenomenon in particular, namely ‘crashes’. These appear to be occurring with greater frequency in the current electronic markets. He will also study the causes and above all the social costs of crashes. Shihao will focus especially on the Central Counterparties (CCPs) which have been created to prevent another major financial crash.