Shohini Kundu

Shohini Kundu’s research focuses on financial intermediation, regulation, corporate finance and macroeconomics.

Following internships on Wall Street, Kundu was drawn to academic research, and she began studying areas with direct policy relevance. “I work on topics that have an action element,” she says. “I want to produce research that makes our financial system more robust.”

Kundu works on questions that aim to investigate the origins of financial fragility, as well as their direct and indirect effects on asset prices, corporate decisions and macroeconomy. Her recent work investigates how covenants, intrinsic to collateralized loan obligation (CLO) indentures, provide a mechanism through which idiosyncratic shocks may amplify to impose negative externalities on other, unrelated firms in CLO portfolios. “The real costs of fire sales can exacerbate credit crunches by reducing the availability of credit,” says Kundu. “In response, firms make financial and real adjustments. Contrary to traditional fire sale settings, I find CLOs fire-sell loans issued by riskier firms for contractual arbitrage purposes, exploiting loopholes in the design of covenants. We’ve seen this in the bankruptcies of major U.S. retailers, for instance.”

Kundu joined the faculty of UCLA Anderson School of Management in 2021 as an assistant professor of finance.

Education

• Ph.D. Finance, 2021, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
• MBA, 2020, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
• B.A. Economics (Magna Cum Laude), 2016, Cornell University

Working Papers

• The Externalities of Fire Sales: Evidence from Collateralized Loan Obligations
• Financial Covenants and Fire Sales: Fractures in the Leveraged Loan Marke
• The Anatomy of Collateralized Loan Obligations: On the Origins of Covenants and Contract Design
• Banking Networks and Economic Growth: From Idiosyncratic Shocks to Aggregate Fluctuations (with Nishant Vats)
• The Deposits Channel of Aggregate Fluctuations (with Seongjin Park and Nishant Vats)
• What Explains Geographic Variation in Investment? (with Nishant Vats)

Honors and Awards

• 2021 ECB’s Young Economists’ Competition Finalist
• 2021 WFA PhD Candidate Award For Outstanding Research
• 2021 Eugene F. Fama PhD Fellowship
• 2021 Qatar Centre for Global Banking and Finance Young Economist Prize Runnner-Up
• 2020 BlackRock Applied Research Award Winner
• 2020 Stigler Center PhD Dissertation Award
• 2020 NSE-NYU Stern Initiative on the Study of Indian Financial Markets Research Grant
• 2019 Fama-Miller Research Grant
• 2019 LBS Wheeler Institute for Business and Development Research Grant
• 2017 Center for Research in Security Prices Summer Paper Award
• 2017 Stigler Center Research Grant on Regulatory Capture
• 2016 Tapan Mitra Economics Prize for International Finance