Journal of Economic Theory, 2025

Using a noisy search model in loan and deposit markets, we formalize imperfectly competitive two-sided markets for banks. We show dispersion in deposit and loan rates as the equilibrium outcome in the model and provide new insight regarding the transmission mechanism and welfare.

Review of Financial Studies, 2025 

Best Paper on Corporate Finance at the FMA Asia/Pacific 2022

Contrary to the conventional wisdom that collateral is a low-cost mechanism to mitigate financial frictions, we estimate that the shadow cost of pledging collateral is equivalent to an interest rate of 3%-5% for small businesses.

Tracing the weekly mobile footprints at different bank branches during COVID-19 lockdowns in the United States, I document that banks offer lower deposit rates when the branches are visited less often than the same week in 2019. The annual interest loss for depositors due to inactive search is $13 billion.

Using a specially designed household survey with more than 10,000 participants, we show that China's Double-Reduction Policy is ineffective in reducing private tutoring activities and related educational spending. The policy disproportionally disadvantages children from low-income households.

We examine how bank-specific state income tax shocks in the United States interact with local competition and affect the regional deposit market. Notably, higher taxes weaken the long-term local competition by discouraging new entries. 

We examine gender imbalance within households and find female breadwinner households are more likely to get rejected than male breadwinner households when applying for mortgages and are charged with higher loan rates after controlling for various standard loan risk factors.