The FinTech Workforce

PI: Prof. Roni Michaely, HKU
Co-I: Prof. Jillian Grennan, UC Berkeley

Project Abstract: 

Artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging financial technology (“FinTech”) applications such as blockchain and the decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) associated with decentralized finance (“DeFi”) protocols are expected to profoundly change the way commerce is conducted within society. While great changes can represent a major windfall to society, they are not without risks.

Our goal is to produce empirical research that helps answering critical questions for both policymakers and technologists about the effect of these emerging technologies on the workforce. For example, policymakers fear artificial intelligence (AI) will disrupt labor markets, especially for high-skilled workers. We want to investigate this concern using novel, task-specific data for workers.

Our goal is to understand if AI improves product quality, how employees reallocate their efforts, what new tasks are created as AI is adopted, and what the labor market dynamics will look like as talent is reassigned to new opportunities and career path experimentation occurs.

We plan to hire research assistants and associates to help with the data collection and statistical analyses that we plan to conduct for this research project.