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.
Open Finance Adoption and Financial Inclusion: experimental evidence from microentrepreneurs (with Giorgia Barboni, Bernardo Ricca and José Renato Ornelas)
- Funded by IPA Financial Inclusion and JPAL Jobs and Opportunity Initiative
- Summary: link [Draft pending final approval by the BCB]
Does improving knowledge about open finance increase its adoption and lead to greater financial inclusion? We implement a randomized experiment that provides Brazilian microentrepreneurs with targeted information about open finance. The intervention increases open finance adoption by more than 7 percentage points, a 40% increase relative to a control-group mean of 17%. While the intervention increases adoption broadly across the study population, the impacts are largest among firms with greater baseline digital payment (Pix) activity, consistent with lower adoption barriers for digitally engaged firms. Analysis of firm-level administrative data shows that the intervention increases the probability of having an available credit card limit by 4–5 percentage points, or approximately 5–7% relative to the control-group mean. Consistent with this effect, the intervention increases the probability of credit-card spending by 3–4 percentage points, equivalent to approximately 4–6% of the control-group mean. Over a six-month horizon, the intervention also increases access to credit through business bank accounts to a greater extent than through personal bank accounts, raises reliance on working capital loans by 5 percentage points, equivalent to 7% of the control-group mean, and the number of Pix transactions in business accounts by 15%.
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)
[Draft available upon request]
On the Financial Amplification of Regulatory Enforcement: Evidence from Deforestation in the Amazon (with Lucas Iten Teixeira)
[Draft available upon request]
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
Fast Payments Infrastructure and the Cost of International Transactions (with Ertunç Aydogdu and Nicola Limodio)
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.