• Understanding Chronic Bank Failures in Minnesota (Under Review)

Minnesota experienced 23 bank failures during the Great Recession. However, the internal causes of these

failures are not well addressed in the empirical literature: we contribute to the literature by addressing this

issue. This study relies on survival analysis to model the risk of bank failure in Minnesota during the

Great Recession. We explore the econometric gains of incorporating several parametric distributions in

modeling the baseline hazard function. For the Great Recession, we show the importance of the

lognormal distribution in modeling the baseline hazard rate. We find that the key bank-specific factors

that inflate the instantaneous rate of bank failure include higher exposure to nonperforming real estate

loans, moral hazard in bank lending, poor earning capacity to cover loan defaults, and inefficiency in

managing interest expenses on deposits. For macroprudential implications, we find some weak evidence

of contagion in the banking sector, and we highlight the importance of regulatory capital in explaining

bank survival in Minnesota during the Great Recession.

• Adverse Labor Market Outcomes and Hate Crimes (Under Review)

Given the sharp increase in hate crimes reported in the United States during the Great Recession and the

coronavirus pandemic, a few studies attempted to examine the relationship between unemployment and

hate crimes. Particularly, because of the strong covariance between unemployment and hate crimes

observed during these latter periods. However, this study finds that those current findings remain

inconclusive due to several econometric issues that are likely to cause biased estimates of the effect of

unemployment on hate crimes. Given the limitations of the hate crime dataset (for example,

underreporting and data gaps), we contribute to the literature by addressing econometric issues and by

providing new findings concerning linkages between unemployment and hate crimes. For the period

considered here, using the two-step system GMM estimator, this paper finds a nonlinear convex

relationship between the hate crime rate and the unemployment rate. Additionally, we highlight the role of

inertia in understanding the long-run effect of unemployment on hate crimes. Although this study is likely

to suffer from precision issues due to data limitations, using fixed effects and a large sample size allow us

to obtain consistent parameter estimates.

• Monetary Policy and Asset Returns in Vietnam (2022 VEAM Conference)

This paper assesses the significance of the asset price channel of monetary policy in Vietnam. We

estimate a New Keynesian (DSGE) model using Bayesian techniques and successfully match the relevant

empirical results with a large-scale factor-augmented vector autoregression model (FAVAR). We find

robust empirical evidence of a significant asset price channel of monetary policy in Vietnam: impulse

responses of stock returns to monetary policy shocks (both positive and negative) are significant and

consistent with standard macroeconomic theory. This is the first study in literature to provide empirical

evidence of the impact of adverse and expansionary monetary policy shocks on different sectors of the

Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh Stock exchanges by relying on an FAVAR model. More importantly, the results

derived here highlight the relative importance of incorporating a rich-data environment in identifying

monetary policy shocks. Here, we demonstrate that the FAVAR model provides consistent and more

meaningful impulse responses in contrast to the widely used small-scale recursive VARs.