Adam HayesHebrew University of Jerusalem | HUJI · Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Adam Hayes
CFA, MA in Economics, PhD in Sociology
About
20
Publications
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Introduction
I am an economic sociologist in the department of sociology & anthropology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem 🇮🇱
My research investigates sociological factors that influence financial decision-making and that structure economic behavior—which have previously gone unnoticed. This work reveals novel effects that social relations, culture, institutions, and technology have on economic action such as investing, borrowing & lending, and financial risk-taking. I also work on crypto & blockchain.
Additional affiliations
June 2021 - present
September 2016 - May 2021
September 2015 - January 2021
Position
- Instructor
Description
- Instructor in the MSc in Digital Currencies program (online) DFIN 535 (Digital Currencies in the Developing World)
Education
September 2016 - May 2021
August 2013 - May 2015
August 1997 - May 2001
Publications
Publications (20)
This paper aims to identify the likely determinants for cryptocurrency value formation, including for that of bitcoin. Due to Bitcoin’s growing popular appeal and merchant acceptance, it has become increasingly important to try to understand the factors that influence its value formation. Presently, the value of all Bitcoins in existence represent...
Weber famously invoked ‘ideal types’ as an analytic device with which to measure empirical reality against some hyper-rational fabrication. Case in point: non-professional (lay) investors appear to be the antithesis of rational economic man. They have been cast as less-informed, less-skilled, and less-knowledgeable than professional market practiti...
Ordinary individuals are increasingly charged with making investment decisions not only for themselves but also for close others. A child’s college savings account and a spouse’s retirement savings are instances where investing has become unmistakably relational. In this paper, we posit a theory of relational investing that extends Zelizer’s relati...
This article builds the argument that Bourdieu’s dispositional theory of practice can help integrate the sociological tradition with three prominent strands of behavioral economics: bounded rationality, prospect theory, and time inconsistency. I make the case that the habitus provides an alternative framework to show how social and mental structure...
How does algorithmic finance operate in society as it crosses the threshold into the hands of lay investors? This article builds on original ethnographic research into a new class of algorithmic trading programs known as ‘roboadvisors’—inexpensive, automated, digital financial platforms that enable ordinary people to invest very small minimum amoun...
Behavioral economics has become a dominant set of theories in explaining economic behavior, yet such behavior remains under the limited purview of psychological, cognitive, or neural approaches. This article draws on and extends Viviana Zelizer’s social meaning of money framework in conjunction with new work in ‘relational accounting’ to suggest a...
Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and blockchains have become buzzwords in the media and are attracting increasing academic interest, mainly from the fields of computer science and financial economics. In this essay, I argue that cryptocurrencies and blockchains are important objects of general social science research and thought, but not for their ‘money...
This study back-tests a marginal cost of production model proposed to value the digital currency Bitcoin. Results from both conventional regression and vector autoregression (VAR) models show that the marginal cost of production plays an important role in explaining Bitcoin prices, challenging recent allegations that Bitcoins are essentially worthl...
This study back-tests a marginal cost of production model proposed to value the digital currency bitcoin. Results from both conventional regression and vector autoregression (VAR) models show that the marginal cost of production plays an important role in explaining bitcoin prices, challenging recent allegations that bitcoins are essentially worthl...
This study seeks to extend the social meaning of money to account for the valorization of distinct forms of household wealth, using the 401(k) retirement account as an exemplar. In doing so, particular economic shocks are framed within the disasters literature for the first time. The institutional shift from corporate pensions to individual retirem...
Purpose
In this paper, we gather together the minimum units of users' identity in the Bitcoin network (i.e., the individual Bitcoin addresses), and group them into representations of business entities, what we call “super clusters”. While these clusters can remain largely anonymous, we are able to ascribe many of them to particular business catego...
Bitcoin has ushered in the age of blockchain-based digital currency systems. Secured by cryptography and computing power, and distributed across a decentralized network of anonymous nodes, these novel systems could potentially disrupt the way that monetary policy is administered – moving away from today's human-fallible central bankers and towards...
The notion of an entirely digital form of money has captured the curiosity of economists, computer scientists, and philosophers alike from the time the computer was still young. Both technologies had existed independently: cryptography, useful in encoding email messages, sensitive information and digital files; decentralized, distributed networks w...
As bitcoin becomes more important as a worldwide financial phenomenon, it also becomes important to understand its sources of value formation. There are three ways to obtain bitcoins: buy them outright, accept them in exchange, or else produce them by 'mining'. Mining employs computational effort which requires electrical consumption for operation....
Though well-intentioned, the current system of tax deferral for retirement contributions undermines public policy aimed at strengthening retirement security for all Americans. In fact, it has become a regressive policy that contributes to wealth inequality. Two employees who are identical savers and investors in every way except for income, receive...
Bitcoin has become the de facto 'gold' standard among cryptocurrencies as it is the most widely accepted in commerce, has the largest mining network, and greatest volume of transactions. Because of this, miners of other SHA-256 cryptocurrencies will tend to convert those altcoins into bitcoin in order to transact in a meaningful way with the real e...
This paper aims to identify the likely source(s) of value that cryptocurrencies exhibit in the marketplace using cross sectional empirical data examining 66 of the most used such 'coins'. A regression model was estimated that points to three main drivers of cryptocurrency value: the aggregate computational power employed in mining for units of the...
Questions
Questions (3)
If I am standardizing β coefficients to present in my regression output, how do I report standard errors (which are based on the unstandardized betas) -- or you don't?
Pardon my naivete, but as a student of economic sociology, I feel like I am missing out on some crucial overlap in economic anthropology and economic psychology.
Can somebody please articulate the boundaries of each of these subfields, both in terms of scope, methodology, and theoretical foundation? Where do they overlap?
Projects
Projects (2)
How does economic inequality impact decision making, such as changes in risk tolerance, investment decisions, use of financial products, use of debt, cost of borrowing, etc.
