M&As Efficiency Gains: Evidence from Bank Branch-level Data (with Bernardo Ricca), Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis (Forthcoming)
International Lending Channel, Bank Heterogeneity and Capital Inflows (Mis)Allocation (with Silvia Marchesi), European Economic Review (2025), 105212.
Banks' Physical Footprint, Digital Payment Technologies and Fintech Growth (with Bernardo Ricca and José Renato Ornelas) -
R&R at Management Science
ANPEC-FEBRABAN Prize for the best paper in banking
Coverage: World Bank, BBC Brasil (in portuguese)
Do physical bank branches moderate the diffusion of digital payment technologies? Does the diffusion of these technologies enable fintechs to expand? To answer these questions, we leverage unexpected bank heists that use explosives and render branches temporarily inoperable. We show that these attacks are not associated with local crime trends and that they deplete the branches’ cash inventory, disrupting their capacity to supply cash services. We show that this disruption leads to persistent increases in digital payments usage and that a smaller cash dependence boosts digital institutions’ growth not only in payment but also in credit markets.
Sanctions, Financial Frictions, and the Organization of Conflict (with Nicola Limodio)
Invited submission to the Review of Financial Studies.
This paper studies whether financial sanctions increase the financial frictions faced by terrorist groups and how these affect their organization. We exploit staggered sanctions on Pakistani terrorist leaders, linked to unique administrative data matching leaders' identities to charity board composition. After sanctions, associates of sanctioned terrorist leaders create more charities, exposed charities raise more funds, and affected groups splinter into factions. This reallocates terror: attacks increase in Pakistan but decline in the US and Western Europe. A multi-agent LLM analyzes qualitative evidence and yields friction intervals with a midpoint near 20 percent, comparable to a wealth tax on terrorist organizations.
Unleashing International Trade through Financial Integration: Evidence from a Cross-Border Payment System (with Gustavo S. Cortes and Vinicios P. Sant'Anna)
Leveraging administrative data on the universe of South African exporters (2010–2019), we study how cross-border payment integration affects trade. Exploiting the staggered rollout of an RTGS system across 14 SADC countries, we find bilateral trade among participants rises by about 34%—an effect comparable to an 8.3–12.1 percentage point tariff reduction—with no evidence of diversion away from non-partners. The gains are concentrated in destinations with domestic RTGS systems, weaker pre-existing financial links to South Africa, and among more financially dependent firms, and are mirrored in aggregate country-partner trade volumes.
On the Financial Amplification of Regulatory Enforcement: Evidence from Deforestation in the Amazon (with Lucas Iten Teixeira)
[draft available upon request]
We study how financial intermediaries amplify shocks to regulatory enforcement. In the Brazilian Amazon, anti-deforestation enforcement relies on optical satellite monitoring, whose effectiveness varies predictably with seasonal cloud cover. Beginning in 2013, enforcement follow-through weakened: monitoring signals remained available but became less likely to generate sanctions. Exploiting predetermined cloudiness, we show that sanctions fall most in high-detection municipality--months. Borrower risk subsequently declines, as loan-loss provisions and rural-credit defaults fall, and agricultural credit expands. Using predetermined bank exposure and within-borrower comparisons across lenders, we show that this response reflects credit supply rather than credit demand. In our preferred specification, the estimated deforestation response is approximately 3.5 times as large in municipalities with high pre-existing agricultural lending capacity compared to conterparts with low agricultural lending capacity. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that financial amplification accounts for roughly one-third of the aggregate deforestation response. Our findings show that financial intermediation can materially magnify the real effects of weaker regulatory enforcement.
Open Finance, Privacy, Trust and Financial Inclusion: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Brazil (with Giorgia Barboni, Bermardo Ricca, and Jose Renato Ornerlas)
- Funded by IPA Financial Inclusion and JPAL Jobs and Opportunity Initiative
- Summary: link
Redress Delayed, Business Denied: Credit Blacklisting and Entrepreneurship (with Leonardo S. Alencar, Pedro Amoni and Henrik Sigstad)
- Funded by IPA Consumer Protection Initiative
- Summary: link
Who is Left Behind? Digital Divide and Take-up of Digital Programs: Evidence from Brazil (with Daniel Grimaldi, Jessica Gagete-Miranda, Jose Renato Ornerlas and Diego Vera-Cossio)
Fast Payments and the Cost of International Transactions
Mariani, Lucas Argentieri, Jessica Gagete-Miranda, and Paula Rettl. "Words can hurt: How political communication can change the pace of an epidemic" Covid Economics 12 (2020): 104-137.
Mariani, Lucas Argentieri, and Laurini, Marcio Poletti. "Implicit Inflation and Risk Premiums in the Brazilian Fixed Income Market." Emerging Markets Finance and Trade 53, no. 8 (2017): 1836-1853.
Government-owned Banks and Development: on Unintended Consequences of Bank Privatizations
4th QMUL Economics and Finance Workshop Best Paper
Coverage: World Bank
Nel, Jacobus, and Lucas A. Mariani. Economic impacts of FATF recommendations and grey-listing announcement. Economic Research Southern Africa Working Paper No. 05/2022.