Ilona's current research is in the areas of asset pricing and new empirical techniques that can address questions about information diversity, the wisdom of crowds, fintech, and crowdfunding.
In her job market paper, Ilona highlights the significance of information diversity as a phenomenon that is prevalent, measurable, and tradable. Ilona shows how a recently developed statistical technique can infer overlap in agents' information and be used to construct a profitable trading strategy using recommendations of sell-side analysts.
Issues of information aggregation are also prevalent in other contexts in finance, including in crowdfunding. In joint work with Thomas Hellmann and Nir Vulkan, Ilona exploits unique features of equity crowdfunding campaigns to examine the trade-off between ownership and investment.
In another line of empirical work, Ilona analyzes the maturity structure decisions of government debt managers in national treasuries and the prominent role of institutional investors.
Job Market Paper: Can Investors Profit from Information Diversity?
