Welcome! I am a PhD candidate in Finance at Columbia Business School. My research focuses on asset markets, financial intermediation, and financial stability.
Prior to graduate school, I was a research assistant at The Federal Reserve Board.
I am on the 2025-2026 Job Market.
You can find my CV here.
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Job Market Paper
Who Moves, Who Stays: The Rise of SMAs and Tax Fragility of the Mutual Fund Industry (Draft Coming Soon)
This paper documents the fragility of mutual funds (MFs) in the face of competition from separately managed accounts (SMAs) and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Despite facing higher fees and tax inefficiencies, MFs remain a dominant investment vehicle. This paper highlights one channel for this persistence: the significant cost that taxes on unrealized gains create when selling MF shares. These potential gains lock investors in by raising the tax burden of exit, but when redemptions occur these same gains magnify capital gains distributions, shifting taxes onto those who remain and creating incentives for further outflows. I document stylized facts on the rise of SMAs, including their declining minimums and their advantages relative to MFs. Combining new data from SEC filings, I show that MFs with higher unrealized gains experience fewer outflows, generate larger distributions, and have higher fees, consistent with managers responding to a more locked-in investor base. I then develop a model of investor choice and endogenous distributions in which MF capital gains distributions generate strategic complementarities in redemption decisions, producing multiple equilibria: a stable outcome with limited exits and a fragile outcome with cascading redemptions. Counterfactuals highlight how retirement investor flows and higher tax rates amplify these forces.
Working Papers
Economic Impact of Water Scarcity (with Oliver Giesecke and Dhruv Singal)
What is the economic impact of water scarcity? The World Resource Institute projects that 44 countries experience high or extremely high water distress in 2040. We assess the economic impact of water scarcity on land valuations. This Ricardian approach is commonly used in the literature to assess the impact of climate change. Specifically, we focus on farmland valuations in California—one of the most productive farmlands in the world. The semi-arid climate makes its valuation particularly sensitive to the amount of surface and groundwater water available for irrigation. Detailed administrative transaction data from the counties’ assessor offices allows us to estimate repeat sales indices as opposed to a hedonic model which make our results less likely to be affected by unobserved confounders. We find that parcels with better access to freshwater see a 24.9%-25.9% larger appreciation in land values per acre over the time period from 2011 to 2020 depending on the exact specification; we find no statistical significant differential price change between 2000-2011. The differential change in land values points towards large economic effects of water scarcity with beliefs about future climatic conditions being updated due to two severe episodes of drought and signals of legislative willingness to curb groundwater overdraft.
Works In Progress
Complementarity: ETFs and MFs (with Kirsten Burr)
Where are Retirement Investors?
Policy Work
The Universe of Leveraged Bank Loan and High Yield Bond U.S. Mutual Funds (with Ayelen Banegas), FEDS Notes, 2019, Federal Reserve Board
