Abinash Pati

Abinash Pati is an Finance PhD Candidate at Emory University's Goizueta Business School.

His research agenda focuses on two broad themes:
a) the industrial organization of financial markets, and its implications for risk pricing, asset allocation and real outcomes.
b) the role of beliefs and preferences in influencing economic outcomes.

Abinash uses the municipal bond market as a laboratory to study how heterogeneous marginal investors set risk prices in an imperfectly competitive capital market. In his solo work, he shows local banks as being the marginal price setters of interest rate risk. Given the high share of retail ownership in this market, in a co-authored project, he shows that investors’ biased expectations of credit risk have an important role to play in setting the price of credit risk in this market.

Turning to solo work on environmental economics, Abinash uncovers strong heterogeneity in environmental enforcement stringency across counties in the US. His results show that local households’ environmental preferences matter for local polluting plants’ regulatory costs.

His research interests are municipal bonds, intermediary asset pricing, environmental economics, and behavioral finance.