I am a PhD candidate in Finance at the University of Zurich and the Swiss Finance Institute. I am on the 2026/27 academic job market.
My research is in banking and financial intermediation. I am interested in how banks learn about the firms they lend to, and how this information shapes firms’ access to credit. In my job market paper, I study how bank branch closures affect firms’ credit beyond their relationship with the closing bank.
Beyond the Closing Bank: The Indirect Effect of Branch Closures on Firms
with Lorenzo Ferrante · Draft coming soon
When a bank closes its local branch, what happens to the firm’s other lenders? Using Italian credit-register data (AnaCredit) matched to the branch register, we follow about 18,000 cases in which a firm’s local bank closes its branch and decompose their lost credit by lender. The closing bank accounts for only about a third of the decline. The firm’s other incumbent lenders, banks that closed nothing, also cut credit and account for roughly 70% of the total. Rather than substituting for the departing local bank, co-lenders act as complements. We document two channels. In an information channel, co-lenders’ default forecasts for affected firms become less accurate, and they cut more when they can observe the closing bank’s actions through the credit register. In a firm channel, affected firms become riskier, and co-lenders cut more when the firm depended more on the closing bank. The cost of losing a local bank thus spreads through the firm’s whole lending network.
Credit from the closing bank and from the firm’s average incumbent co-lender, in the 12 months around a local branch closure (change from the month before; 95% confidence bands).
Working papers
Impeded Flights in European Sovereign Debt Markets
with Lorenzo Ferrante, Per Östberg and Thomas Richter · Working paper
Abstract
Theory predicts that yield shocks trigger flights from risky to safe assets. In the European sovereign bond market, these flights are impeded: after stress events, trading volume falls by 30% over the following week rather than increasing. The mechanism is a collapse in liquidity supply: bid-ask spreads rise by 56% and market depth falls sharply. Exploiting that the same bond trades on both a domestic and a pan-European MTS platform, we show that spreads widen more, depth falls more and volume drops more on the domestic platform, where market makers hold more of their own sovereign’s debt. Bank-dealers’ concentrated exposure to sovereign risk can freeze a central secondary market when rebalancing is most needed.
