Welcome! I’m a Finance PhD Candidate at the Kenan-Flagler Business School, UNC Chapel Hill.


I will be on the job market during the 2024-25 academic year.


Research Interests: Financial Intermediation, Development Economics, Corporate Governance

Contact Information: mohit_desai@kenan-flagler.unc. edu

CV:

Working Papers

What Drives Bank Credit Lines? Wholesale Funding and Bank Liquidity Creation (JMP) [SSRN]
Presentations: 20th Annual Finance Conference at WashU (poster session with award, scheduled), OFR PhD Symposium 2024 (scheduled), AFA PhD Poster Session 2025 (scheduled), Kenan-Flagler Business School

Abstract: Liquidity creation is one of the primary functions of banks, and bank credit lines are the single largest source of it. Existing theories of banks’ supply of credit lines have highlighted the central role of traditional retail deposits. In this paper, I revisit those results and find little evidence to support those claims. Instead, I document that sources of non-retail funding wholesale funding– have been an important driver of banks’ contingent commitments. I show that banks with greater wholesale funding ratios lend more using off-balance sheet commitments. Causal estimates rely on two identification strategies (1) membership dates of banks to the Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) system in a staggered difference-in-differences (DiD) exercise and (2) shift-share instrument design. Estimates from these exercises suggest a 1% increase in wholesale funding leads to 0.3-0.4% increase in contingent commitments. I rule out reverse causality in a standard DiD design using an exogenous regulatory change– introduction of FIN 46– which materially impacted banks’ supply of credit lines. These results run contrary to the prevailing deposit-based theories of banks’ commitment lending and have important implications for banks’ “specialness” in commitment lending, aggregate liquidity risk, and post-2008 decline in bank credit lines.

Bridging the Information Gap: Sowing the Seeds of Productivity with High-Speed 4G Internet (with Sumit Agarwal, Pulak Ghosh, and Nishant Vats) [SSRN]
Presentations: AFA 2025 (scheduled)

Abstract: Can high-speed internet boost information access and enhance productivity? Combining granular geographic data on the introduction of 4G with remote-sensing data on agricultural productivity, we show that the improvement in information dissemination due to the introduction of 4G leads to an increase in productivity, fertilizer consumption, and credit uptake. Our identification strategy exploiting the staggered state-level introduction of Rights of Way (RoW) policies meant to promote the growth of telecom infrastructure echoes similar results. Overall, we find that six years after the introduction of 4G internet, the annual income of agricultural households grew by 14.5%. Using detailed farmer-level internet-browsing data, we show that the introduction of 4G is related to internet adoption and acquiring agri-related information. Exploiting spatial heterogeneity in the value, reliability and accuracy of information we argue that 4G improves productivity by improving access to information. We document that the decentralized nature of internet-based information access dominates traditional call or text-based information access by circumventing frictions associated with trust in the state. While our results indicate that high-speed internet is an important tool for information dissemination, merely introducing internet infrastructure may not be sufficient. Information that is disseminated must be reliable and valuable, making internet access a complement to information generation.

Work-in-progress

Forecasting Returns with an Intertemporal CAPM (with Andrei Goncalves)

Long-term Effects of Redlining: Evidence from Entrepreneurial Activity (with John Barrios and Nishant Vats)

CEO Entrenchment and Activist Investors (with Noah Lyman)