Kevin Mei

I am a fifth-year Finance PhD student at The University of Texas at Austin, McCombs School of Business. My research interests include financial intermediation, financial technology, and macrofinance.

Prior to joining the PhD program, I worked for Boston Consulting Group for five years and left as a Project Leader. My case experience is concentrated in the telecommunications industry, financial institutions, and pricing topics.

Curriculum vitae | Google Scholar

Research

A Theory of Speculation in Community Assets
with Michael Sockin

Revise and Resubmit, American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

We model a community platform where users learn the about quality of its services over time by using its native tokens. The key friction is users can buy tokens for services or trade them primarily for speculation. In the presence of network effects, this tension can cause learning traps where no user adopts the platform’s services because the risk-adjusted benefit of adoption is lower than that from speculation. Our model can be applied to any asset that derives value from network effects and suggests high token inflation and incentive schemes favoring service usage may be integral to sustaining user participation.

Presentations: University of Delaware and Philadelphia Fed Fintech and Financial Institutions Conference 2024

How Do Crypto Flows Finance Slavery? The Economics of Pig Butchering
with John M. Griffin

Through blockchain addresses, we trace crypto flows and uncover methods commonly used by scammers to obfuscate their activities. The perpetrators interact freely with major crypto exchanges, sending over 98,000 small trust-building inducement payments annually to exchanges commonly used by U.S. and European investors. Funds exit the Ethereum network in large quantities, mostly in Tether, through less transparent but large exchanges. Criminal enterprises pay approximately 33 basis points in transaction fees and moved $27.8 billion annually into suspicious exchange deposit accounts between 2021-2023, including $5.6 billion annually sent from Western exchanges. Our findings highlight how many actors in the ‘‘reputable’’ crypto industry facilitate criminal capital flows.

Media coverage and mentions: Bloomberg, BusinessInsider, The Daily Texan, Annie Lowrey for The Atlantic, Peter Guest and Emily Fishbein for MIT Technology Review, PolyMatter on Youtube

Policy mentions: CFTC Press Release; Senate Committee on Armed Services; House Financial Services Subcommittee on National Security, Illicit Finance, and International Financial Institutions: Hearing Committee Memorandum, Chairman Luetkemeyer Remarks and Secret Service Office of Investigations Testimony; CFTC World Investor Week

Presentations: 4th Annual Crypto and Blockchain Economics Research (CBER) Forum (YouTube link to presentation); International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) Committee 8 on Retail Investors - São Paulo Meeting 2024; 2025 Midwest Finance Association (MFA) Annual Meeting

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