Distrust or Speculation? The Socioeconomic Drivers of U.S. Cryptocurrency Investments

Raphael Auer and David Tercero-Lucas

No 9287, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Employing representative data from the U.S. Survey of Consumer Payment Choice, we disprove the hypothesis that cryptocurrency investors are motivated by distrust in fiat currencies or regulated finance. Compared with the general population, investors show no differences in their level of security concerns with either cash or commercial banking services. We find that cryptocurrency investors tend to be educated, young and digital natives. In recent years, a gap in ownership of cryptocurrencies across genders has emerged. We examine how investor characteristics vary across cryptocurrencies and show that owners of cryptocurrencies increasingly tend to hold their investment for longer periods.

Keywords: digital currencies; cryptocurrencies; distributed ledger technology; blockchain; payments; digitalisation; banking; household finance; money; bitcoin; ether; xrp; bitcoin cash; litecoin; stellar; eos (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D14 D91 E42 G11 G12 G28 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-isf, nep-mac, nep-mon and nep-pay
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp9287.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Distrust or speculation? The socioeconomic drivers of U.S. cryptocurrency investments (2022)
Working Paper: Distrust or speculation? the socioeconomic drivers of U.S. cryptocurrency investments (2021)
Working Paper: Distrust or speculation? The socioeconomic drivers of U.S. cryptocurrency investments (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_9287

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().