Pranav Garg - Research

Papers-in-progress

1. Monetary Transmission in Equity Markets: Evidence from Financial Intermediaries, with M. Famiglietti [PDF]

Presented at: SGF Conference Zurich 2026, MFA Annual Meeting 2026, 19th International Behavioral Finance Conference at the University of Chicago 2025, AFA Posters 2025, Midwest Macro Meetings at Purdue University 2024.

Doctoral Symposium Outstanding Paper Award, MFA Annual Meeting 2026

We show that heterogeneous equity flows across financial intermediaries amplify monetary policy transmission to asset prices. We find that mutual funds with performance-sensitive retail investors experience outflows after contractionary monetary shocks, triggering forced equity sales. Banks have funding that is insensitive to recent performance and therefore absorb these sales and provide liquidity. This intermediary-level heterogeneity aggregates meaningfully: stocks held by more performance-sensitive investors exhibit larger price declines following monetary tightening. To explain these patterns, we develop an intermediary asset pricing model where heterogeneous intermediaries manage portfolios for investors with performance-sensitive flows, highlighting a novel mechanism of monetary transmission to equities.

2. Facing Default?, with M. Guenzel, S. Kogan, M. Niessner & K. Shue

Presented at (including upcoming): SFS Cavalcade 2026, 17th Annual FSU Truist Beach Conference 2026, Adam Smith Workshop 2026, FRA Early Ideas Session 2025, Boulder Summer Conference on Consumer Financial Decision Making 2025.

(Draft coming soon)

3. When Supervision Meets Politics: Bailouts, Lending and Investment [PDF]

Presented at: MFA Annual Meeting 2026, 6th RCF-ECGI Corporate Finance and Governance Conference 2025, Bank of Finland's Banking Workshop 2024, Indian Management Research Conference at IIM Ahmedabad 2024.

This paper shows that political interference can transform supervision intended to discipline banks into a vehicle for political lending. Examining India's 2015-16 asset quality review, I find state-owned banks massively underreported bad loans, consequently triggering taxpayer-funded bailouts. These bailouts carried political strings that increased credit supply by state banks to "zombie" firms and risky state-owned enterprises, while private banks deleveraged. Exploiting staggered state elections in a within-bank design, I find such lending concentrates at branches within election constituencies. This pattern is unique to bailed-out state banks. Political bailouts crowd out productive private firms and dampen investment by 7%.

4. From Collateral to Credit to Real Activity: Causal Evidence on the Bank Lending Channel, with A.-L. Delatte & J. Imbs [PDF]

Using a unique identification methodology, we show that easing collateral requirements has economy-wide effects on firms' real outcomes through increased credit. These effects benefit all firms, not just those with newly eligible collateral. By categorizing banks based on their pre-reform loan portfolios, we compare banks with varying exposures to the change in collateral constraints but otherwise similar loan portfolios. We introduce a bank-level metric for firms' real outcomes, calculated as a loan-weighted average across borrowers, which enables us to use the same identification for both credit and real effects. The impacts on credit, investment, productivity, and dividends are large.

5. Monetary Policy, Industry Leaders, and Growth, with J. Weber [PDF]

Presented at: AFA Posters 2026, Midwest Macro Meetings at Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland 2025.

Heterogeneity in monetary transmission arises from differences between industry leaders and followers (firms with high and low market shares). We present evidence that the cost of capital and investment responses of industry leaders are less sensitive to monetary shocks. This is true even in the absence of financial constraints and differences in product characteristics, requiring an explanation of monetary policy heterogeneity without financial frictions. We argue that industry leaders not only have higher productivity but also profits that are less sensitive to aggregate economic fluctuations, possibly due to stronger incentives to develop inelastic consumers. Reduced cyclicality in profits ensures that leaders are less affected by monetary policy, therefore maintain stable investment expenditures. Furthermore, since we document heterogeneity with respect to market shares rather than size alone, we argue that there are persistent implications for industry dynamics. Our findings highlight unexplored distributional consequences of monetary policy that extend beyond typical financial frictions.

Technical reports

1. Monetary Policy Transmission in India: New Evidence from Firm-Bank Matched Data, Reserve Bank of India, Working Paper Series (DEPR) 01/2021

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