Publications

  1. The Dynamics of Retail Deposit Balances (with Bronson Argyle, Benjamin Iverson, Taylor Nadauld, and Christopher Palmer), Journal of Financial Economics, 2026, forthcoming
    We investigate the dynamics of household deposits using account-level data from 12 million accounts across 154 U.S. credit unions. Significant skewness in the retail deposit distribution—with 10% of depositors controlling 70% of total deposits—means large-balance accounts drive aggregate retail deposit flows. On average, high-balance accounts become large after significant one-time inflows and are more likely to experience large, idiosyncratic drawdowns. Unlike low-balance households, high-balance retail depositors are not sensitive to interest rate shocks. Additional evidence suggests that overall retail deposit stickiness is driven by high-balance accounts that are used as medium-run liquidity stores rather than for interest income.

    This paper was previously circulated under the title, Sticky Deposits, Not Depositors

  2. Who Invests in Crypto? Revealed Types and Economic Drivers of Retail Investment (with Darren Aiello, Scott Baker, Tetyana Balyuk, Marco Di Maggio, and Mark Johnson), Review of Financial Studies, 2026, conditionally accepted pending data replication package
    Using transaction-level data from millions of U.S. households, we provide the first comprehensive characterization of retail cryptocurrency investment. Crypto investors are distinguished not by demographics but by a latent behavioral type revealed through consumption patterns—one that also predicts higher participation in traditional equity brokerages. The economic forces driving crypto investment, including income shocks, workplace peer effects, and inflation exposure, mirror those driving traditional investment. Crucially, households whose consumption matches the crypto-investor profile are more responsive to all these drivers across both asset classes, suggesting that investor type is a more relevant distinction than asset class.

    This paper was previously circulated under the title, Who Invests in Crypto? Wealth, Financial Constraints, and Risk Attitudes.

  3. Retail Betting Markets (with Scott Baker, Justin Balthrop, Mark Johnson, and Kevin Pisciotta), 2026, The Annual Review of Financial Economics 18, forthcoming
    This paper examines the rapid expansion and convergence of retail betting markets. We analyze market design elements, discuss economic utility, and highlight shared behavioral drivers of sports betting markets, prediction markets, and retail options trading. Our review underscores how technological innovation, behavioral biases, and regulatory arbitrage have shaped recent market evolution. We highlight important considerations for policy-makers facing a changing landscape and outline possibilities for further research.
  4. Gambling Away Stability: Sports Betting's Impact on Vulnerable Households (with Scott Baker, Justin Balthrop, Mark Johnson, and Kevin Pisciotta), 2026, Journal of Financial Economics 183, 104330. Executive Summary
    We estimate the causal effect of online sports betting on households' investment, spending, and debt management decisions using household transaction data and a staggered difference-in-differences framework. Following legalization, sports betting spreads quickly, with both the number of participants and frequency of bets increasing over time. This increase does not displace other gambling or consumption but significantly reduces savings, as risky bets crowd out positive expected value investments. These effects concentrate among frequent bettors and low-savings households. Our findings highlight the potential adverse effects of online sports betting on vulnerable households.
  5. Initial Public Offerings and the Local Economy: Evidence of Crowding Out (with Jess Cornaggia, Matt Gustafson, and Kevin Pisciotta). 2024, Review of Finance 28, 1245–1273.
    We test the effect of going public on economic growth in the areas surrounding IPO firms. We focus on IPO-filing firms, thus ensuring that both treatment and control firms are at similar life cycle stages, and use post-filing stock market fluctuations as an instrument for IPO completion. We show that IPOs that are large relative to the size of their counties lead to a 1.1 percentage point relative reduction in annual county-level establishment growth, with similar effects for employment and population growth. There are no corresponding effects for relatively small IPOs. These negative effects appear to be driven by a crowding out of local sector peers, but the crowding out also disrupts local agglomerations and slows down growth among other businesses that rely on local demand. Overall, our results indicate that macroeconomic gains from IPOs trade off against disruptions in local agglomeration economies where public firms originate.
  6. Do Insiders Hire CEOs with High Managerial Talent? (with Yelena Larkin), 2024, Review of Finance 28, 271–310.
    We examine the effect of the composition of the board of directors on the firm's CEO hiring decision. Using a novel measure of talent, characterized by an individual's ascent in the corporate hierarchy, we show that firms with non-CEO inside directors tend to hire CEOs with greater managerial skills. This effect obtains for both internal and external CEO hires; moreover, the effect is pronounced when inside directors have stronger reputational incentives and limited access to soft information about the candidate. Our findings demonstrate that boards with inside directors more effectively screen for managerial ability, thereby improving the CEO hiring process.
  7. Higher Minimum Wages Reduce Capital Expenditures (with Matt Gustafson), 2023, Management Science 69, 2933–2953.
    Using cross-state and intertemporal variation in whether a state's minimum wage is bound by the federal minimum wage, we provide evidence that minimum wage increases lead U.S. public firms in minimum wage sensitive industries (i.e., retail, restaurant, and entertainment) to cut capital expenditures. These effects are concentrated 1-2 years after the law goes into effect. Prior to the minimum wage increase, investment trends are similar across minimum wage sensitive firms in bound versus unbound states and we find little evidence that minimum wage changes affect U.S. public firm investment outside of these industries.
  8. Revenge of the Steamroller: ABCP as a Window on Risk Choices (with Carlos Arteta, Mark Carey, and Ricardo Correa), 2020, Review of Finance 24, 497–528.
    We use credit-arbitrage asset-backed commercial paper vehicles as a laboratory to empirically examine financial institutions' motivations to take bad-tail systematic risk. By comparing the characteristics of global banks that sponsored credit-arbitrage vehicles prior to the global financial crisis to those that didn't, we show that owner-manager agency problems, government safety nets, and government ownership of banks are associated with bad-tail systematic risk-taking. Although good governance is associated with less risk-taking on average, well-governed banks that also have a high ex ante expectation of being bailed out by the government take more risk. Lastly, we find mixed evidence that tougher bank capital regulation deters bad-tail risk-taking.

    Lead Article, Editor's Choice

  9. Friends or Foes? Target Selection Decisions of Sovereign Wealth Funds and Their Consequences (with Ugur Lel), 2011, Journal of Financial Economics 101, 360–381.
    This paper examines investment strategies of Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs), their effect on target firm valuation, and how both of these are related to SWF transparency. We find that SWFs prefer large and poorly performing firms facing financial difficulties. Their investments have a positive effect on target firms' stock prices around the announcement date but no substantial effect on firm performance and governance in the long-run. We also find that transparent SWFs are more likely to invest in financially constrained firms and have a greater impact on target firm value than opaque SWFs. Overall, SWFs are similar to passive institutional investors in their preference for target characteristics and in their effect on target performance, and SWF transparency influences SWFs' investment activities and their impact on target firm value.

    This paper was previously circulated under the title, Friends Or Foes?: The Stock Price Impact of Sovereign Wealth Fund Investments and the Price of Keeping Secrets.

Working Papers

  1. The Effects of Cryptocurrency Wealth on Household Consumption and Investment (with Darren Aiello, Scott Baker, Tetyana Balyuk, Marco Di Maggio, and Mark Johnson), R&R at Journal of Finance
    This paper uses transaction-level data across millions of accounts to identify cryptocurrency investors and evaluate how fluctuations in individual crypto wealth affect household consumption, equity investment, and local real estate markets. We estimate an MPC out of unrealized crypto gains that is more than double the MPC out of unrealized equity gains but smaller than the MPC from exogenous cash flow shocks. This MPC is mostly driven by increases in cash/check spending and mortgages. Moreover, households sell crypto to increase both discretionary as well as housing spending. As a result, crypto wealth causes house price appreciation-counties with higher crypto wealth see higher growth in home values following high crypto returns. Our results indicate that cryptocurrencies have substantial spillover effects on the real economy through consumption and investment into other asset classes.
  2. When Money Moves In: The Consequences of Housing Wealth (with Darren Aiello and Gregor Schubert)
    Using a novel dataset tracking millions of households across home purchases, we demonstrate that an increase in housing wealth benefits households by allowing them to move up the property ladder, but also causes these households to pay a premium for their new home. These decisions spill over to the broader housing market. In aggregate, the flow of housing equity gains into an area cause upward regional price pressure—a 10% increase in equity gain amongst incoming movers leads to 0.4 percentage point higher house price growth—with these higher prices disproportionately impacting first-time home buyers in the area.
  3. Going Public, Going Places: IPOs and Geographic Expansion (with Jess Cornaggia, Matt Gustafson, and Kevin Pisciotta)
    Prior to going public, firms typically operate in a single area and exhibit less than one-quarter of the geographic dispersion of matched seasoned peers. Most of this dispersion gap closes within four years of an IPO and is strongly related to the difference between the pre-IPO geographic footprint of the firm and that of its public peers. Post-IPO geographic expansion remains significant throughout our sample but has persistently declined over time, partly due to the reduced geographic concentration of firms that go public. In sum, private capital markets are increasingly, but not completely, able to satisfy firms' demand for geographic expansion.
  4. Technological Change, Job Tasks, and CEO Pay
    This paper examines how changes in the composition of the human capital of the workforce impact the CEO. Over the last fifty years, technological change has caused the tasks workers perform to shift from routine to nonroutine work. I estimate that these changes in the workforce caused CEO pay to double over the last thirty years, explaining roughly one third of the aggregate increase in CEO pay. Consistent with this effect being caused by the existence of synergies between CEOs and nonroutine workers, I use text analysis of 10-K statements to show that managers of nonroutine workforces focus relatively more on employees and that this focus leads to large increases in firm value and profitability. Together, this suggests that a substantial portion of the increase in CEO pay over the past three decades represents an optimal response to skill-biased technological change.
  5. Do Bank Capital Regulations Concentrate Systematic Risk?
    As a result of the Enron scandal, new regulations were enacted that increased the capital charge for holding assets in off balance sheet vehicles. I utilize a triple difference specification to identify the effect of this exogenous regulatory shock on bank systematic risk exposure. I find that after the regulation, banks' exposure to off-balance sheet assets at vehicles with high systematic risk increases relative to vehicles with low systematic risk and relative to non U.S. banks which are not affected by the regulation. These results suggest that capital regulation might have the perverse effect of increasing the systemic risk of the U.S. financial system.

Work in Progress

  1. Using AI and Property Listings to Understand Housing Market Transformations (with Darren Aiello and Gregor Schubert).
  2. Substitution Across Betting Platforms (with Scott Baker, Justin Balthrop, Mark Johnson, and Kevin Pisciotta).
  3. Betting with Short-dated Options (with Mark Johnson and Tyler Shumway).
  4. The Influence of the Crowd on Polymarket Trades (with Tommy Brown, Mark Johnson, and Luka Vulicevic).
  5. Moral Hazard in Moral Beliefs (with Mark Johnson).