Working Papers​

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Bank Presence and Health

Job market paper​​​

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

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

This paper studies how firms allocate their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) spending to shed light on the potential social effects of corporate contributions to public goods. We do so using a novel dataset covering the universe of the CSR expenditures of Indian firms over the period 2015-2019, which includes detailed information on the projects and social causes firms invest in. Using textual analysis methods, we construct an index of the technological proximity of firms’ industries to social causes to capture the extent to which firms use their production processes for CSR projects. Results suggest that firms do spend more on causes they have a comparative advantage in, in line with the theoretical literature on the desirability of CSR (Besley and Ghatak, 2007; Hart and Zingales, 2017). However, firms tend to spend in geographic areas where social returns are relatively low.

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Peer Effects in Deposit Markets

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.