Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) can be used to represent ownership of digital art or any other unique digital item where ownership is recorded in smart contracts on a blockchain. NFTs have recently received enormous attention from both cryptocurrency investors and the media. We examine why NFTs have gotten so much attention. Using vector autoregressive models, we show that Bitcoin returns significantly predict next week’s NFT growth in popularity, measured by Google search queries. Moreover, wavelet coherence analysis suggests that Bitcoin and Ether returns are significant drivers of next week’s attention to NFTs. These results indicate that the remarkable increases in prices of major cryptocurrencies can explain the hype around NFTs.

This paper examines the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on Bitcoin trading volume. Using data from Apple mobility trends and several time-series econometric models, we find that investors became active participants during the COVID-19 pandemic period and traded more bitcoins on days with low mobility associated with lockdown mandates. These results remain robust after controlling for stocks and gold returns, the VIX index, and the level of attention and sentiment toward Bitcoin, as measured by Google search frequencies and the tone of Tweets discussing Bitcoin. These results suggest that when individual investors have ample free time on their hands, they trade cryptocurrencies as a pastime and use the Bitcoin market as a form of entertainment. Moreover, our results have important implications concerning investors’ herding behavior and overconfidence leading to noise trader risks and bubbles typically accompanied by high trading volume in cryptocurrency markets.

This paper examines whether consumer confidence forecasts future consumption in Chile. The results show that consumer confidence indicators are positively related to later consumption growth, suggesting that consumption increases after periods of high consumer confidence. This result contradicts the theoretical predictions of consumption expenditures (for instance, the Precautionary Saving Hypothesis). Furthermore, the results show that consumer confidence measures can be good predictors of consumption, even after controlling for the information contained in other economic fundamentals. This evidence suggests that consumer confidence in Chile also reflect a component of consumer sentiment that is unrelated to macroeconomic conditions. Finally, additional results show that predictive models that include consumer confidence produce more accurate predictions for positive, rather than for negative, changes in consumption over the next month.

This article examines the effects of family control and pyramidal ownership on firms’ capital structure decisions. After studying a sample of listed family and nonfamily firms in Chile, we find that families take a conservative approach to debt and financial risk exposure. We test the hypothesis that family firms restrict the use of debt in order to avoid the monitoring role of creditors, which could limit their enjoyment of the private benefits of control. In keeping with this hypothesis, we find a U-shaped relationship between leverage and the degree of pyramidal ownership that is more pronounced among family firms than nonfamily firms. We do not find any evidence that is consistent with the hypothesis that family-controlled firms have low leverage ratios due to their access to internal capital markets. In fact, conversely, we find that listed family firms provide more loans to related companies than comparable nonfamily firms.

We analyze the effects of attention to global warming on the success of environmental initial coin offerings (ICOs) measured by the total funding amount raised in the actual ICOs and the long-term survival of the projects. Using a database featuring 324 environmental initial coin offerings between 2017 and 2019, we find that attention to global warming increases the total funding raised in an environmental ICO. Moreover, we find that environmental offerings that occur during periods of greater attention to global warming are significantly less likely to fail in the long term. Our results are consistent with the idea that investor attention as a market-discipline mechanism increases the likelihood of survival for environmental ICOs.