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Wednesday, 25 October, 2023

Mikhail Mamonov: Essays on Political Distortions in Banking and the Real Economy

Dissertation Committee:

Ctirad Slavík (CERGE-EI, chair)

Marek Kapička (CERGE-EI)

Veronika Selezneva (Université Paris Dauphine)

Sergei Slobodyan (CERGE-EI)

Defense Committee:

Michal Kejak (CERGE-EI, chair)

Byeongju Jeong (CERGE-EI)

Michal Franta (Czech National Bank)

Referees:

Volker Nitsch (Technische Universität Darmstadt)

Thorsten Beck (European University Institute, Florence)

Online connection: https://call.lifesizecloud.com/19468923, passcode: 4539

Abstract:

Politics brings numerous distortions into the work of the banking system and the real economy. This Thesis explores how political distortions affect bank lending decisions, impact the real decisions made by firms borrowing from "politically distorted" banks, and change the overall shape of the macroeconomy. The first chapter studies the impacts of global financial sanctions on banks and their corporate borrowers in Russia at the micro level. It establishes that the overall effect of sanctions consists of a combination of large negative anticipation effects (intended) and large positive added-value effects (unintended), which completely offset each other. The second chapter takes a macroeconomic perspective to examine the effects of sanctions on key aggregated indicators including GDP, consumption, and investment, and then explores cross-sectional variations of those effects in samples of firms and households. It shows that the sanction announcements in 2014–2015 were actually very potent: the underlying sanctions may have led to a GDP decline of 3.2%, not 0 to 1.5\% as found in previous literature. The third and fourth chapters analyze a "parallel" political distortion in Russia in the 2010s—a large-scale bank closure policy initiated by the Central Bank of Russia six months before the sanctions began, which resulted in the detection and closure of roughly 700 private banks by 2022. Using unique credit register data on the universe of loans in Russia, the chapters investigate how firms were sorting between "good" and (not-yet-detected) "bad" banks following the closure of their prior banks, and how this sorting affected these firms' performance in terms of employment, investment, and market sales.

Full Text: "Essays on Political Distortions in Banking and the Real Economy"