Paper

After the Bretton Woods, the US Financial hegemony has shown a complex evolution rooted in structural power and market power, and is undergoing a brand-new digital-fintech-driven evolution. The paper innovatively integrates reduced-form regressions and Bayesian structural vector autoregressions to identify potential transformative digital forces that could affect the international monetary order and the US financial hegemony. The empirical results indicate that US-dollar-backed Bitcoin is promisingly possible to exert a significant positive effect on the dollar index DXY in the near future, as most Markov Chain Monte Carlo draws of the 95% credible interval of the impulse response are positive. It further accredits the main long-term driving factor on Bitcoin to stablecoin supply at the 95% credible level and then jointly reveals the logic that the self-reinforcement cycle from dollar to stablecoin to Bitcoin finally back to dollar is playing a role in bolstering the global dominance of the dollar in the international monetary order.

A long political economy tradition argues that centralized states deploying concerted industrial policies are crucial for developing productive industries. Yet developing countries that have emerged as major exporters of knowledge-based services (e.g. software/ R&D / AI services) have often lacked these state structures. I advance a new theory of how the rise of these services-exporting hubs have driven by skilled migrant networks engaging with porous and dispersed bureaucracies. These structures foster bureaucrats' connectedness to peripheral entrepreneurial networks, allowing policymakers to leverage distributed tacit knowledge held by migrant co-nationals in processes of fine-grained collaboration. I test this argument using first-ever, agency-level datasets of industrial policy bureaucracies covering all GATT/WTO members since 1989, and historical process-tracing of the Phillipines' and Malaysia's diverging knowledge economy transitions based on 50 elite interviews. My results challenge a vast literature underscoring "Weberian" bureaucracies and autonomous "developmental states" as prerequisites for structural transformation in the era of knowledge-based capitalism.

When do people choose formal financial services and when do they instead exit `a la Hirschman (1970) using cash or Bitcoin? Despite financial technologies' (fintech) growth, citizens are still bypassing traditional institutions: cash remains sticky worldwide and Bitcoin adoption is increasing. I refer to this phenomenon as financial disintermediation, distinguishing between intermediated fintech (mobile banking) that relies on trusted third parties and disintermediated alternatives (peer-topeer Bitcoin, cash) that operate without central authorities and protect anonymity. Extending Hirschman's "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty" framework to finance, I argue that payment choices reflect political preferences rather than economic efficiency alone. My research reveals that autocratic governance increases citizens' "exit" from formal financial systems. Citizens in these contexts either distrust institutions or fear them, resulting in exit through disintermediated alternatives. I test this theory using cash dependency (167 countries, 2001-2020) and Bitcoin peer-to-peer transactions (143 countries, 2020). My findings confirm that financial disintermediation is systematically prevalent in autocratic contexts. This work contributes by bringing individual agency back into financial intermediation debates, extending Hirschman's framework to finance, and providing the first systematic evidence linking autocratic governance to payment preferences.