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• RFS replication package

Abstract

We study how terminated correspondent banking relationships affect international trade. Drawing on firm-level export data from emerging Europe, we show that when local banks lose access to correspondent services, their corporate clients (especially small- and medium-sized enterprises) experience significant export declines. Firms only partially offset lost exports with higher domestic sales, resulting in lower total revenues and employment. Other firms cease operations entirely. These firm-level impacts aggregate to lower product-level exports from countries more exposed to correspondent bank retrenchment.

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Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of organ trafficking on local conflict using georeferenced data on conflict events and hand-collected data on local transplant infrastructure in countries known for illegal transplanting. Exploiting exogenous variation in kidney demand from the US waiting list for kidneys, I find that higher US kidney demand increases conflict in localities with a transplanting hospital. A one-standard deviation increase in the US waiting list for kidneys raises conflict probability by 17% and the number of conflict events by 0.9%. This effect is stronger for higher-income waiting list patients, who are more likely to afford the costs of an illegal transplant, while it is absent for dialysis patients, with limited travel ability. Furthermore, armed groups with transplanting capacities intensify attacks when US kidney demand is higher, spreading violence spatially.

Awarded the EEA Young Economist Award, 2022.

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• Paper (SSRN)

Abstract

Banks lend more to banks that are similar to them. Using data from the German credit register and proprietary supervisory data on the quality of banks’ loan portfolio, we show that a similar portfolio of the lending and borrowing bank helps to overcome information asymmetries in interbank markets. While interbank lenders generally do not adjust their lending to information on the counterparty’s portfolio quality, banks with an exposure to similar industries and regions strongly react to this private information. Lending between similar banks is particularly important for borrowers with an opaque loan portfolio, which do not obtain credit from dissimilar peers.

Presented at the IIPF Annual Meeting 2026. An earlier version circulated as “The Precious Networks of the Rich: How the Wealthiest Shape the Tax Agenda”.

Abstract

Despite broad public support for progressive taxation, the U.S. tax system is among the least progressive in its modern history. This paper asks whether early educational co-presence with people who later become billionaires predicts legislators’ subsequent tax-policy behavior. We use large language models to classify the distributional direction of federal tax bills introduced since 1973 and construct a new campus-time-overlap measure. The measure captures entry into a future wealth-bearing contact opportunity structure, not a verified friendship. Exposed legislators accumulate more tax sponsorships over their careers, but this difference disappears when activity is aligned by Congress and chamber. Within common political periods, they instead originate a larger share of their tax activity. Across primary sponsorships and co-sponsorships, the proposals they back are 1.4 percentage points more likely to be regressive rather than progressive. Separately, bills introduced by exposed primary sponsors advance through Congress at higher rates; exposure among same-day original co-sponsors does not account for that relationship. Among the highly selected bills that reach recorded passage votes, exposed and unexposed copartisans do not differ detectably in regressive-direction-aligned voting on the same decision. The sponsorship association persists within university, birth cohort, party, and Congress and is absent for nearby but non-overlapping campus attendance; its point estimate is larger for exposure to inherited than self-made fortunes, although that contrast is imprecise. Campus-time overlap also predicts direct itemized donations, but observed giving does not statistically account for the sponsorship association. Because selection within campus and cohort remains possible, the estimates identify conditional predictive relationships with an educational opportunity structure, not causal influence by particular billionaires.

Presented at VfS and IIPF 2024 and at the World Inequality Conference 2026. An earlier version circulated as “Profit Shifting via Carbon Emission Trading: First Indications”.

Abstract

This paper provides evidence that multinational groups use trading in the EU Emissions Trading System to shift profits to affiliates in low-tax jurisdictions. Carbon allowance transfers show patterns that are hard to explain by compliance trading alone: the share of volume traded within corporate groups is nine times what would be expected, transactions are concentrated in December rather than around the April compliance deadline, and more than two thirds of the volume goes to buyers that have never handed in an allowance. I show that these patterns are consistent with internal forward contracts priced to favour affiliates in low-tax countries. Such contracts have long been suspected as a channel for profit shifting in commodity markets but are difficult to observe. The EU ETS is unusual because its registry records every transfer between identified accounts. Linking these records to Orbis ownership data and hand-collected disclosures from trading hubs allows me to identify transfers that look like internal forwards. Groups using them have lower effective tax rates, and effective tax rates fall with the share of internal volume that is forward-like. In groups that trade this way, profits in the lowest-taxed affiliate respond more strongly to windfall profits from excess free allocations generated elsewhere in the group. After the EU centralised its emissions registries in 2012 and made quick round trips, a more easily detectable form of intra-group trading that can be used to shift profit, harder, round trips fell while forward-like trades increased. The results provide evidence of a previously undocumented channel of profit shifting and have implications for other commodity markets in which internal forward contracts remain unobserved.