Review of Financial Studies, Revise and Resubmit
We investigate how the Freedman's Savings Bank, the first bank collecting deposits from African Americans following Emancipation, attracted close to 100,000 depositors across 17 states within just a few years. We find that the bank promoted itself in newspapers more than any other bank. A textual analysis shows that the content of the advertising, which included false promises and a moralizing rhetoric, was also unique. This misleading advertising intensified with the fraudulent use of the deposit funds to the benefit of elite white networks, leading to the collapse of the bank and depositor losses rarely matched in history.
Linking individual data on depositors with a 1% sample of the 1870 census, Stein and Yannelis (2020), SY2020 henceforth, argues that the Freedman's Savings Bank, the first bank collecting deposits from African Americans, had large positive effects on the wealth, literacy, school attendance, income and business ownership of the recently freed population. We show that, in SY2020, (i) the historical statements supporting the assumptions of the identification strategy are incorrect, (ii) the sample has representativeness, replicability, and selection issues, (iii) the linking strategy has a false positive rate higher than 95\%, and (iv) the instrumental variable analysis and placebo tests are not conclusive. Therefore, one cannot draw conclusions on short term effects of the Freedman's Savings Bank from SY2020's empirical setting.
NEW Reply to Stein and Yannelis (2021), with Purnoor Tak
Taxing Bank Leverage: The Effects on Bank Portfolio Allocation, with Thomas Kick and Steven Ongena
Review of Financial Studies, Revise and Resubmit
CEPR-Reltif Research Project, Code and Data, Online Appendix
We investigate whether fiscal reforms that reduce banks' incentives to leverage also affect banks' portfolio allocation.
What Drives Finance Professors' Wages?, with Boris Vallée and Alexey Vasilenko
We document a large wage premium for finance professors and investigate its drivers by exploiting unique data on wages, affiliations, department, publications and citations.
Capital Inflows, Credit Growth and Skill Allocation, with Andrada Bilan and Luciana Barbosa
2020 Texas Finance Festival
2019 FIRS Conference, Cavalcade Conference
2016 Lamfalussy Research Grant, Presented at the 2017 EFA, 2017 Paris Finance Conference, Online Appendix