FIRSA’s Contributions to Open Science

VU Open Science Competition 2026

Alfredo Hernández Sánchez

Vilnius University

2026-10-21

What is the FIRSA Project?

Regulatory sandboxes allow firms to test financial innovations under supervision.

  • Why do European countries adopt sandboxes or choose other approaches?
  • How do sandboxes operate, and what do regulators learn from them?
  • How do individuals and public institutions respond to financial innovation?

Vilnius University · October 2024–September 2026
EU-funded MSCA WIDERA Fellowship · Grant agreement 101180601

Main Findings and Methods

Micro

Crypto participation

Financial knowledge and digital confidence are positively associated with recent crypto exposure; overconfidence measured as miscalibration is negatively associated.

Methods

EU-wide survey across 27 countries; weighted logistic regressions with country fixed effects.

(Hernández Sánchez 2026c)

Meso

Sandbox adoption

Similar national profiles produce different regulatory choices. Non-adoption often accompanies established alternatives to sandbox testing.

Methods

Crisp-set QCA of 30 EU/EEA countries, complemented by comparative case evidence.

(Hernández Sánchez 2026a)

Macro

FinTech narratives

Central bankers welcome innovation within the boundaries of financial stability, regulatory oversight and institutional authority.

Methods

789 BIS speeches; qualitative frame construction, zero-shot classification and manual validation.

(Hernández Sánchez 2026b)

Shareable and Reusable Outputs

Code & methods

Replication materials
Data preparation, models and figures.
Crypto study repository

Text analysis tutorials
Worked examples with Python and R.
Zero-shot classification · Named entity recognition

Web scraping
Browser automation and corpus construction.
RSelenium tutorial

Training & teaching

Build and publish dashboards
Shiny deployment instructions and example code.
Tutorial · Cheatsheet · GitHub

Recorded webinars
Sessions with slides and supporting materials.
R Shiny · Text analysis & LLMs

Computational social science syllabus
Course design covering R, Quarto and text analysis.
Full syllabus

Browse FIRSA materials · FIRSA on GitHub

The FIRSA Interactive Dashboard

Open Science and Internationalization

Open-source philosophy, reproducibility, and public dissemination.

Open training

180 unique registrants for the research dashboard webinar.
Practical instruction supported by public code, slides and a recording.

International exchange

Vilnius University · University of Melbourne · European Commission JRC
A public discussion of text analysis, LLMs and methodological choices.

Teaching beyond VU

Workshops for Ukraine
Training on reactive Shiny apps and cloud deployment, with publicly available presentation materials.

Thank you for your attention!

References

Hernández Sánchez, Alfredo. 2026a. “Choosing Not to Experiment: Regulatory Sandbox Adoption and Policy Instrument Choice in Europe.” FIRSA Working Paper 2026/02. Vilnius University. https://doi.org/10.33774/apsa-2026-fqjw1.
———. 2026b. “Circumscribed Disruption: FinTech Narratives in Central Banking.” New Political Economy, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2026.2737145.
———. 2026c. “Overconfidence, Financial Literacy, and Crypto Asset Ownership in Europe.” FIRSA Working Paper 2026/01. Vilnius University. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6445380.