Daniel Rabetti

Daniel Rabetti

Visiting Scholar

Visiting Scholar

 
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Daniel Rabetti
Contact Information
Featured Work Publications Awards & Honors

Professor Rabetti is a financial economist from São Paulo, Brazil, with a Ph.D. in Business from Tel Aviv University. He joined the National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School in 2023 as the S. Dhanabalan Chair in Quantitative Studies and an Assistant Professor in Accounting and Finance, and is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard Business School.

His research lies at the intersection of financial economics, innovation, and intermediation, focusing on emerging technologies such as blockchain, decentralized finance (DeFi), and artificial intelligence. His work directly informs policymakers on critical financial and regulatory issues, contributing to the ongoing discourse on digital finance and financial innovation.

Prof. Rabetti's research has been presented at major monetary policy and regulatory agencies, including the Bank of Canada, Bank of Japan, Bank of Finland, Bank of Italy, Bank of Israel, European Banking Authority, European Systemic Risk Board, Federal Reserve, International Monetary Fund, Monetary Authority of Singapore, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Securities and Exchange Commission, and Swiss National Bank. His work has also served as a basis for recommendations on the application of tax law to digital assets in response to U.S. Congress request for information regarding digital asset taxation.

His research has been featured at top finance, accounting, and digital finance conferences such as AAA, ABFER, AFA, CBER, IEEE, HARC, JAE, JAR, SFS Cavalcade, Tokenomics, and WFA. It has also been published in top-tier academic journals, including the Journal of International Business Studies, Management Science, Journal of Accounting Research, and Journal of Accounting & Economics, and covered by leading financial media outlets such as Bloomberg, The Washington Post, and The Financial Times.

Before joining HBS as a visiting scholar, Prof. Rabetti visited the Finance group at Cornell University through the Fintech Initiative and DEFT Labs. Beyond his academic contributions, he advises fintech ventures in the blockchain space, enjoys playing football, and has a deep appreciation for Portuguese literature.

Featured Work
An Anatomy of Crypto-Enabled Cybercrimes
Articles In Advance, Fast-Track Issue, February 2025.
The advent of cryptocurrencies and digital assets holds the promise of improving financial systems by offering cheap, quick, and secure transfer of value. However, it also opens up new payment channels for cybercrimes. Assembling a diverse set of public on- and off-chain, proprietary, and hand-collected data, including attacker–victim negotiations and dark web conversations in Russian, we present an initial anatomy of crypto-enabled cybercrimes, highlighting relevant economic issues and proposing areas for future research. Among others, we find ransomware, as the most dominant organized crypto-enabled cybercrime, entails criminal gangs that operate like firms who adopt modern revenue models and carefully manage their reputations. We suggest that blanket restrictions on cryptocurrency usage may prove counterproductive. Instead, blockchain transparency enables effective forensics for tracking, monitoring, and shutting down dominant cybercriminal organizations, which potentially facilitates a more secure and reliable crypto ecosystem in the longer term.
Trading Volume Manipulation and Competition Among Centralized Crypto Exchanges
Articles In Advance, Regular Issue, February 2025.
How competition affects manipulation by firms of information about important attributes of their products and how such information manipulation impacts firms’ short-term and long-term performance are open empirical questions. We use a setting that is especially suitable for answering these questions—centralized crypto exchanges, on which information manipulation takes the form of inflated trading volume. We find that static and dynamic competition measures are positively associated with volume inflation, indicating that competition may lead to increased information manipulation. Exchanges that manipulate volume obtain short-run benefits but are punished in the long run, consistent with the trade-off between short-lived increases in rents and future losses because of damaged reputation.
International Business and Decentralized Finance
Journal of International Business Studies, Volume 55, May 2024, Pages 840–863.
Over the last decade, the green shoots of a new economic order have emerged as decentralized technologies challenge traditional financial systems. Decentralized finance (DeFi) holds the potential to transform international business (IB) by offering accessible financial services across borders, disrupting traditional intermediaries, and promoting financial inclusion. While traditional fintech has challenged banks, DeFi operates outside legacy systems, leveraging blockchain technology and smart contracting to introduce a new range of products and services that provide first-movers with an upper hand to both expand their business across the globe as well realize cost savings on existing business. Despite offering advantages like efficiency, transparency, and security, DeFi faces regulatory uncertainties and scalability, adoption, and stability concerns. Our study explores how DeFi can seamlessly integrate into the IB space while addressing these challenges. In addition to offering insights for investors, multinational firms, and regulators, we also lay the groundwork for future IB research in the fintech domain. As the DeFi innovation unfolds, understanding and harnessing its potential can empower stakeholders to engage responsibly and effectively in this transformative landscape.
Tax-Loss Harvesting with Cryptocurrencies
Journal of Accounting and Economics, Volume 76, Issues 2–3, November–December 2023, Pages 101607.
We describe the taxation landscape in the cryptocurrency markets, especially concerning U.S. taxpayers, and examine how recent increases in tax scrutiny have led to changes in crypto investors' trading behavior. We argue conceptually and then empirically document that increased tax scrutiny leads crypto investors to utilize conventional tax planning with tax-loss harvesting as an alternative to non-compliance. In particular, domestic traders increase tax-loss harvesting following the increase in tax scrutiny, and U.S. exchanges exhibit a significantly greater amount of wash trading. Additional findings suggest that broad-based and targeted changes in tax scrutiny can differentially affect crypto traders’ preference for U.S.-based exchanges. We also discuss other gray areas for tax regulation related to new crypto assets, such as Non-Fungible Tokens and Decentralized Finance protocols, that further highlight the importance of coordinating tax policy and other regulations.
Coins for Bombs: The Predictive Ability of On-Chain Transfers for Terrorist Attacks
Journal of Accounting Research, Volume 60, Issue 2, May 2022, Pages 427-466.
This study examines whether we can learn from the behavior of blockchain-based transfers to predict the financing of terrorist attacks. We exploit blockchain transaction transparency to map millions of transfers for hundreds of large on-chain service providers. The mapped data set permits us to empirically conduct several analyses. First, we analyze abnormal transfer volume in the vicinity of large-scale highly visible terrorist attacks. We document evidence consistent with heightened activity in coin wallets belonging to unregulated exchanges and mixer services—central to laundering funds between terrorist groups and operatives on the ground. Next, we use forensic accounting techniques to follow the trails of funds associated with the Sri Lanka Easter bombing. Insights from this event corroborate our findings and aid in our construction of a blockchain-based predictive model. Finally, using machine-learning algorithms, we demonstrate that fund trails have predictive power in out-of-sample analysis. Our study is informative to researchers, regulators, and market players in providing methods for detecting the flow of terrorist funds on blockchain-based systems using accounting knowledge and techniques.
Initial Coin Offering (ICO) Success and Post-ICO Performance
Management Science, Volume 68, Issue 12, February 2022, Pages 8515-9218, iii-iv.
We compile a comprehensive data set of initial coin offerings (ICOs) from 19 data sources including 11 ICO aggregators. We alleviate severe limitations of available ICO data by performing the first systematic analysis of ICO data quality. We use our data set to study determinants of ICO funding success as well as post-ICO operating performance and provide evidence on some novel determinants of initial and longer-term ICO success. Finally, we show that post-ICO operating performance is positively associated with contemporaneous token returns and is generally negatively associated with token return volatility, suggesting that post-ICO operating performance has financial ramifications.
Journal Articles
Awards & Honors
Appointed to the S. Dhanabalan Professorship at the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2023.
Recipient of the Research Excellence Award from the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2025.
Recipient of the Track Chair Excellence Award at the Hawaii Accounting Research Conference (HARC) in 2025.
Included in the 2024 Top 10 Most-Cited Papers in 2022–2023 at the Journal of Accounting Research.
Winner of the 2024 Best Paper Award at the Financial Markets and Corporate Governance Conference.
Winner of the 2024 Best Paper Award at the 14th Annual Financial Markets and Corporate Governance (FMCG) Conference.
Winner of the 2023 Best Paper Award at the Global AI Finance Research Conference.
Recipient of the FARS Excellence in Reviewing Award from the Midyear Meeting of the Financial Accounting and Reporting Section (FARS) of the American Accounting Association in 2023.
Winner of the 2022 Best Paper Award at the International Risk Management Conference (IRMC).
Winner of the 2022 Pacific-Basin Finance Journal (PBFJ) Award for Finance Research Excellence.
Winner of the 2022 Best Paper Award at the 12th Annual Financial Markets and Corporate Governance (FMCG) Conference.
Winner of the 2021 Best Paper Award at the 4th Annual University of Western Australia (UWA) Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Conference.