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 (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

3. Management and Mental Health

joint with Morten Bennedsen, Maria Schiler, Daniela Scur

• This study examines how management practices influence mental health outcomes, combining management surveys, prescription drug records, and other Danish administrative data. Improved management quality is associated with reduced mental health drug usage, though the mechanisms vary by sector. Public sector high-ability workers show heightened sensitivity to management quality, while private sector effects are more uniform. Incentive-based practices emerge as particularly effective in lowering stress. These findings reveal the nuanced interplay between management practices, worker characteristics, and mental health, contributing to an understanding of the broader organizational impacts of management beyond productivity.

1. Bankruptcy Propagation (Census Project #3120)

joint with Murillo Campello

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

• 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