Jiayi Wei

I'm Jiayi, a PhD Candidate in Finance at INSEAD. I am on the 2026–27 academic job market.

My research studies the real effects of financial infrastructure. People experience finance not as theory but through the systems they use to pay, invest, and trade, and the design of these systems determines who gains and who loses as they spread. My work traces how financial infrastructure shapes household welfare, local business dynamics, and the information embedded in market prices. To answer these questions, I build large-scale datasets that exist nowhere off the shelf, from billions of Bitcoin transactions to transaction records of facility-level AI infrastructure, and pair rigorous causal identification with economic models that turn local estimates into aggregate welfare answers.

My job market paper, The Real Effects of Anonymous Payment Systems, provides the first causal evidence on the social cost of payment anonymity. Using the staggered rollout of over 30,000 Bitcoin ATMs across U.S. counties as a laboratory, I show that access to anonymous payments raises local crime by 6.9 percent, fuels drug markets and overdose deaths, and erodes household balance sheets, with the heaviest burden on the most vulnerable communities. Tracing billions of transactions through the Bitcoin network, I build a model that scales these local effects to a national cost of payment anonymity and identifies the policy levers that reduce it most efficiently.

Before INSEAD, I earned a Master's degree in Finance from Tsinghua University (PBCSF) and Bachelor's degrees in Economics from Peking University and in Linguistics from Beijing Language and Culture University.