Working papers

"Credit Allocation and Macroeconomic Fluctuations"
(with Emil Verner)
[BiBTeX] [SSRN]

• Selected media coverage: World Bank All About Finance Blog
• Summary: The sectoral allocation of credit—who in the economy is borrowing—is key for understanding why some credit booms go bad while others do not.
  
  

"Busy Bankruptcy Courts and the Cost of Credit"
Accepted, Journal of Financial Economics
[BibTeX] [SSRN]

• Selected media coverage: Oxford Business Law Blog
• Summary: Backlog in bankruptcy courts affects ex-ante firm and loan outcomes by increasing expected recovery values for creditors.
  
  

"Electoral Cycles in Macroprudential Regulation"
Revise and Resubmit, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy
[BibTeX] [SSRN] [Older version: ESRB WP 106]
Shortlisted for the ESRB Ieke van den Burg Prize 2019

• Selected media coverage: ProMarket, The Grumpy Economist, FAZ Blog
• Summary: Macroprudential policies, which that are supposed to curtail the risks of future financial crises, are less stringent before general elections, probably because politicians do not want to cut off voters from mortgages.
  
  

"The Effect of Social Media on Elections: Evidence from the United States"
(with Thomas Fujiwara and Carlo Schwarz)
[BibTeX] [SSRN]

• Summary: Twitter likely persuaded moderate voters to cast their vote for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden instead of Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections, but had little effect on other election outcomes.
  
  

"From Hashtag to Hate Crime: Twitter and Anti-Minority Sentiment"
(with Carlo Schwarz)
[BibTeX] [SSRN]

• Selected media coverage: Southern Poverty Law Center, NY Times Interpreter, Reveal.org, Stepfeed, The Daily Beast (1), The Daily Beast (2), ProMarket, Scientific American, Big Think, FiveThirtyEight, Project Syndicate, Newsweek, CNN
• Summary: By amplifying existing tensions, social media likely contributed to the recent increase in anti-minority sentiment in the United States around Donald Trump's political rise.
  

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Publications

"Fanning the Flames of Hate: Social Media and Hate Crime"
(with Carlo Schwarz)
Forthcoming, Journal of the European Economic Association
[BibTeX] [SSRN] [CAGE WP 373]

• Selected media coverage: New York Times, New York Times (Opinion), The Guardian (Opinion), The Economist, Huffington Post, Financial Times, Deutsche Welle, Handelsblatt, Wirtschaftswoche, Pro Asyl, Watson.ch, Belltower News, WDR Cosmo (German radio), The New European, GQ, The Daily Beast, Politico, TechCrunch, Bloomberg, Time Magazine
• Summary: Exogenous variation in Facebook and internet outages suggests that social media fueled anti-refugee sentiments in Germany, probably by exposing potential perpetrators to narrow viewpoints about immigrants.
  
  

"Bank Branching Deregulation and the Syndicated Loan Market"
(with Jan Keil)
Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis (2020), 55(4), 1269-1303.
[BibTeX] [SSRN] [Ungated draft]

• Summary: Deregulation of branching restrictions in the US led to a change in credit composition away from syndicated loans, suggesting that diversification of geographical risks is an important rationale for why commercial banks use these contracts.
  
  

"Does the Sectoral Allocation of Credit Matter for Financial Stability Risks?"
Prepared for the INET Initiative on Private Debt
Forthcoming book chapter for publication by INET and Chicago University Press
[BibTeX]

• Summary: I review the literature on private debt and financial crises, and discuss the role of credit allocation.