Papers​

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Shadow Banks on the Rise: Evidence Across Market Segments

Revise & Resubmit, Journal of Financial Economics

with Pulak Ghosh (IIM Bangalore), Nirupama Kulkarni (CAFRAL), and Nishant Vats (WashU)

This paper uses credit bureau data on 648 million retail loans in India to examine the comparative advantages of shadow banks across market segments. Using weather shocks as a proxy for credit demand, we show that Fintechs respond more in uncollateralized markets. In contrast, non-Fintech shadow banks exhibit stronger responsiveness in collateralized markets. Exploiting geographic heterogeneity in the adoption of digital payments, we identify technology as the key advantage for Fintechs. Leveraging four natural experiments, we document the significance of lower regulation for non-Fintech shadow banks. Our results suggest that the comparative advantage of shadow banks differs across market segments.​

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Bank Presence and Health

Review of Finance (2025)​

This paper examines whether more bank presence in underserved areas can improve households’ health. Leveraging a 2005 Reserve Bank of India policy and a regression discontinuity design, I demonstrate that five years post-policy, treatment districts have 27 more bank branches than control districts. This expansion increases household employment and access to savings accounts, enhancing health investments. On the healthcare supply side, hospitals utilize more credit and expand services. Six years after the policy, households in treatment districts are 19 percentage points less likely to suffer from non-chronic illnesses in a given month. Chronic diseases remain unaffected.

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When Private Firms Provide Public Goods: The Allocation of CSR Spending

Working Paper

with Lucie Gadenne (Queen Mary) and Noémie Pinardon-Touati (Columbia)​​

This paper studies how firms allocate their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) expenditures to inform the welfare effects of corporate contributions to public goods. Using a novel dataset containing detailed information on the quasi-universe of firms’ CSR projects in India over the period 2015–2019, we document key facts on the allocation of CSR spending across social topics (e.g., health, education) and locations. We develop a new method to measure the technological proximity between firms’ production technology and CSR topics using natural language processing, and find that firms spend more on topics in which they have a technological advantage. This is consistent with an efficient allocation of CSR expenditures across topics and the main rationale for CSR in the literature. Considering allocation across locations, however, we find that firms spend more in areas where social returns are likely lower. Overall, our results suggest that CSR mandates may be an efficient but inequitable way to increase public good provision.

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Peer Effects in Deposit Markets

Working Paper

with Naz Koont (Stanford)​​​

We provide first empirical evidence that consumer peer effects matter for banks' deposit demand. Using a novel measure that depicts for each county how exposed peers are to a specific bank in a given year, we tightly identify the causal effect of peer exposure on deposit demand through a fixed effects identification strategy. We address key empirical challenges such as time-invariant homophily. We find that a one percent increase in a bank's peer exposure leads to a 0.05 percent increase in deposit market share. This effect has become stronger over time with the rise of the internet and social media, which facilitate cross-county communication. Peer exposure is especially relevant for smaller banks and customers that have access to the internet.