Alexei Karas

University College Roosevelt · Department of Social Sciences

Using rich administrative data from a small Dutch liberal arts college, I study how the number of students enrolled in a course affects student grades and course evaluations. Exploiting variation across parallel sections of the same course taught by the same instructor, I show that class size has a significant negative effect on student grades in m...

For every closed Russian bank I collect its closure reasons. I divide these reasons into categories and report them in the form of tags. The data come from online sources. Combined with Russian banks’ financial statements, freely available on the Central Bank of Russia’s website, this dataset provides ample possibilities for empirical research: on...

For every Russian bank we hand collect information on its registration, license revocation, liquidation, location changes, acquisitions, entrance to and exit from the Deposit Insurance System as well as state and foreign ownership. The data come from various sources freely available online. Yet, some of these data are hard to find or require some t...

We exploit uncertainty regarding banks' involvement in money laundering activities as a natural experiment to study the functioning of the interbank market in uncertain times. We show that bank couples with a stronger relationship (i.e., more frequent and reciprocal interactions before the event) are more likely to continue lending to one another,...

For every Russian bank we hand collect information on its registration, license revocation, liquidation, location changes, acquisitions, entrance to and exit from the Deposit Insurance System as well as state and foreign ownership. The data come from various sources freely available online. Yet, some of these data are hard to find or require some t...

The strengthening of land rights has been proposed as a policy to reduce financial market frictions and promote private investment in low- and middle-income countries. But assessments of these potential effects have proven inconclusive. One reason may be that research has focused on actors that face difficulties accessing credit for reasons other t...

We use daily data on bilateral interbank exposures and monthly bank balance sheets to study network characteristics of the Russian interbank market over August 1998–October 2004. Specifically, we examine the distributions of (un)directed (un)weighted degree, nodal attributes (bank assets, capital and capital-to-assets ratio) and edge weights (loan...

This paper empirically tests theories of bank runs. We use a structural panel VAR to extract runs from deposit market data. Identification exploits cross-sectional heterogeneity in deposit insurance: we identify bank runs as adverse deposit market supply shocks hitting uninsured banks harder compared to insured. Conditional on a run, we study the b...

Have you ever dreamt of designing a course that would be tailored to student’s individual needs? That would stimulate their creativity and allow them to satisfy their curiosity? That would give them control over their learning: when, where and whom to learn with? That would have no exams, tests or deadlines (and presumably no stress)? That would al...

Using evidence from Russia, we carry out what we believe to be the literature's cleanest test of the direct impact of deposit insurance on market discipline and study the combined effect of a banking crisis and deposit insurance on market discipline. We employ a difference-in-difference estimator to isolate the change in the behavior of a newly ins...

We construct a database on Russian banks and make part of it freely available. Whenever possible, we test consistency within and across different data sources.

We propose to incorporate cross-sectional heterogeneity into structural VARs. Heterogeneity provides an additional dimension along which one can identify structural shocks and perform hypothesis tests. We provide an application to bank runs, based on microeconomic deposit market data. We impose identification restrictions both in the cross-section...

We study whether bank efficiency is related to bank ownership in Russia. We find that foreign banks are more efficient than domestic private banks and, surprisingly, that domestic private banks are not more efficient than domestic public banks. These results are not driven by the choice of production process, the bank’s environment, management’s ri...

We explore how the introduction of explicit deposit insurance affects deposit flows into and out of banks of varying risk levels. Using evidence from a natural experiment in Russia, we employ a difference-in-difference estimator to isolate the change in the deposit flows of a newly insured group (households) relative to an uninsured “control” group...

Using a database from post-communist, pre-deposit-insurance Russia, we demonstrate the presence of quantity-based sanctioning of weaker banks by both firms and households. Evidence for the standard form of price discipline, however, is weak. This combination of findings is unusual within the context of the literature on market discipline. But it is...

This contribution studies the effects of credit contagion on the credit risk of a portfolio of bank loans. To this aim we introduce a model that takes into account the counterparty risk in a network of interdependent firms that describes the presence of business relations among different firms. The location of the firms is simulated with probabilit...

We suggest an additional transmission channel of contagion on the interbank market - the liquidity channel. Examining the Russian banking sector, we and that the liquidity channel contributes significantly to understanding and predicting interbank market crises. Interbank market stability Granger causes the interbank market structure, while the opp...

There has been a notable debate in the banking literature on the impact of bank competition on financial stability. While the dominant view sees a detrimental impact of competition on the stability of banks, this view has recently been challenged by Boyd and De Nicolo (2005) who see the reverse effect. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this...

We study whether bank efficiency is related to bank ownership in Russia. We find that foreign banks are more efficient than domestic private banks and - surprisingly - that domes-tic private banks are not more efficient than domestic public banks. These results are not driven by the choice of production process, the bank's environment, management's...

There has been a notable debate in the banking literature on the impact of bank competition on financial stability. While the dominant view sees a detrimental impact of competition on the stability of banks, this view has recently been challenged by Boyd and De Nicolo (2005) who see the reverse effect. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this...

Using a database from post-communist, pre-deposit-insurance Russia, we demonstrate the presence of quantity-based sanctioning of weaker banks by both firms and households, particularly after the financial crisis of 1998. Evidence for the standard form of price discipline, however, is notably weak. We estimate the deposit supply function and show th...

Using a database from post-communist, pre-deposit-insurance Russia, we demonstrate the presence of quantity-based sanctioning of weaker banks by both firms and households, particularly after the financial crisis of 1998. Evidence for the standard form of price discipline, however, is notably weak. Estimating the deposit supply function, we show tha...

We construct a consistent time series of balances and profit and loss accounts for a large cross-section of Russian banks. We describe our data collection and the procedures applied for controlling and aggregating the data. The resulting dataset constitutes a balanced and representative series of financial indicators covering the evolution of the R...