KINGSVILLE (April 16, 2026) — Texas A&M University-Kingsville College of Business Administration accounting and finance professor Dr. Priti Verma earned the 2026 Current Topics/Emerging Issues Best Paper Award for co-authoring the manuscript titled The Risk-Return Dynamics of Corporate Cryptocurrency Adoption: Evidence from Bitcoin Holdings during the 2026 American Accounting Researchers & Educators Annual Conference last month in Dallas.
“It’s truly rewarding and gratifying to be recognized by any conference for the best paper award,” Verma said. “Papers take pretty long to write, so I was amazed and very, truly happy because I’ve worked on cryptocurrency before, but this one was more about the dynamics of corporate cryptocurrency adoption, which is a little different from individual cryptocurrency holdings.
The paper, which Verma co-authored along with Rahul Verma and Cathy Liu from the University of Houston-Downtown, and was also recently approved to be published by Decisions in Economics and Finance, a specialized academic journal published by Springer Nature and serves as the official publication of the Association for Mathematics Applied to Social and Economic Sciences (AMASES).
For Verma, this was just part of her research on cryptocurrency, which has gained significant popularity in recent years as it has become increasingly integrated into the corporate world.
The paper explores corporations’ adoption of cryptocurrency in various ways, diving into topics such as:
- The impact of Bitcoin holdings on the firm level risk and return
- Explicitly examining the quantity & market values
- Impact on systematic, idiosyncratic & total risk
- Total volatility
- and Abnormal Returns
“There has been a lot of popularity with these cryptocurrencies and not just the major one like Bitcoin, but a wide range of others known as Altcoins,” Verma said. “There’s been a lot of popularity as well as integration of these cryptocurrencies into corporate balance sheets that indicates a notable shift in the treasury management and financial strategy. These digital assets are pretty volatile and companies have had them in their books. That’s something that I was interested in — why hold Bitcoins?”
-TAMUK-
