Research

1. When Collateral Covers the Debt: Bank Monitoring and Bankruptcy Outcomes   Job Market Paper 

• I examine how collateral shapes senior lender monitoring as firms approach bankruptcy and the resulting bankruptcy outcomes. Using hand-collected bankruptcy filings and loan contracts from 2007-2022, I find that lenders systematically shift from covenant-based monitoring of firm performance toward monitoring of liquidity and collateral values to protect their own recovery. This shift is concentrated among overcollateralized lenders. To establish causality, I exploit exogenous variation in local real estate values and aggregate lending market conditions as instruments for collateralization levels. While this monitoring reallocation protects senior lenders' own claims, it lowers firm going-concern values, reduces junior creditor recovery rates, and increases fire sales in bankruptcy.

• Presented at: The Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research 2025 Annual Conference (poster) · The 2025 RCEA International Conference in Economics, Econometrics, and Finance · The International Banking, Economics, and Finance Association (IBEFA) Summer Meeting 2025 · Research Symposium on Finance and Economics 2025 · The 2025 MRS International Risk Conference · NFA 2025 (poster) · SFA 2025 · Eastern FA 2026 (scheduled)

2. Tax Evasion in Relational Contracts

joint with Brian Dillon, John Mulenga, Twivwe Siwale

• Do firm-to-firm relationships involve tacit collusion to evade taxes? We examine this question in Zambia, where fiscal capacity is low and many firm-to-firm transactions do not generate a paper trail. For six months we randomly incentivize retail firms to request formal tax invoices from their suppliers, which makes the transaction more transparent to the tax authority. We find that both high and low levels of financial incentives induce retail firms to collect more tax invoices from their suppliers. Firms with strong supplier relationships at baseline are less responsive to the incentives, consistent with the presence of relational contracts under which there is an agreement that transactions will not be recorded. Using administrative data from the revenue authority we find that our interventions had a small but detectable impact on total VAT revenues.

• Presented at: Zurich Conference on Public Finance in Developing Countries · TRA-IGC-REPOA International Conference on Tax for Growth · Cornell CIDER · CESifo Area Conference on Public Economics 2026 (scheduled)

3. Management and Mental Health

joint with Morten Bennedsen, Maria Schiler, Daniela Scur

• This paper examines how management practices influence mental health outcomes, combining management surveys, prescription drug records, and employment records in Danish administrative data. Management practices benefit workers uniformly in the private sector but disproportionately benefit high-ability workers in the public sector, who exhibit significantly greater sensitivity to management quality. Decomposing management practices reveals that incentive systems and performance monitoring drive these effects. Organizations with stronger incentive and monitoring practices systematically attract and retain higher-quality workers, creating environments where high-ability employees thrive—either through improved working conditions or better worker-organization matching. These findings advance understanding of how management practices affect employee mental health beyond productivity. The results have particularly important implications for public sector organizations in which effective management is critical for retaining talented workers who accept wage penalties for mission-driven work.

1. Bankruptcy Propagation (Census Project #3120)

joint with Murillo Campello

2. Tariff Shock and Firm Financing (Census Project #3003)

• Hedge Fund Shadow Trading in Corporate Bankruptcies (Wei Wang, Yan Yang, and Jingyu Zhang), SFA 2025

• The Effect of New Information Technologies on Asset Pricing Anomalies (Liang Ma and David Hirschleifer), 2025 MRS International Risk Conference

• The Implications of Faster Lending: Loan Processing Time and Corporate Cash Holdings  (Vesa Pursiainen, Hanwen Sun, Qiong Wang, and Guochao Yang), IBEFA Summer Meeting 2025

• Bank Diversification and Tail Risk (Jasper Pan), Research Symposium on Finance and Economics 2025

• Workplace Hostility (Manuela R. Collis and Clementine Effenterre), Conference on The Economics of Working Environment 2024