|| This seminar is open ONLY to EUI members ||

Join us for the next event of the 'Finance in the Tuscan Hills' seminar series, where we host Ryan Israelsen, Professor of Finance and the Kaufman Endowed Professor in Risk Management and Insurance at Michigan State University.

In his paper, coauthored with Tony Cookson (University of Colorado - Boulder), Will Mullins (University of California San Diego), and Marcus Painter (Saint Louis University), Israelsen examines how political partisanship influences individual behaviour during banking crises by analysing a novel dataset of smartphone geolocation data covering 100+ million devices across the United States from 2018-2023. Leveraging granular location data of visits to over 80,000 bank branches nationwide and combining it with precinct-level electoral data to infer political affiliations, they study differential responses to the March 2023 Silicon Valley Bank collapse. Their empirical strategy exploits variation in the predicted partisan affiliation of device owners based on their residential locations to identify the relationship between political identity and crisis response behaviour. They find that individuals from Republican-leaning neighbourhoods were significantly more likely to visit bank branches during the week of the Silicon Valley Bank failure compared to their baseline visiting patterns and relative to individuals from Democrat-leaning neighbourhoods. This effect persists after controlling for demographic characteristics, distance to bank branches, and local economic conditions. Their findings suggest that political partisanship plays a meaningful role in shaping individuals' trust in financial institutions and their propensity to participate in bank runs. These results contribute to their understanding of how political polarisation affects financial stability through its impact on depositor behaviour.

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Ryan Israelsen is a Professor of Finance and the Kaufman Endowed Professor in Risk Management and Insurance at Michigan State University as well as the director of the MSU Finance PhD program. His research examines how market outcomes are affected by biases and frictions in the production and consumption of information by investors, firms, and intermediaries. His research has been published in the top finance journals including The Journal of Finance, The Journal of Financial Economics, and The Review of Financial Studies, and has been awarded best paper at various international conferences and journals. His empirical work makes use of large datasets including SEC EDGAR corporate filings, news data, stock and bond trading data, geolocation (mobile device) data, web server logs, and social media activity. His research answers economic questions by developing and examining measures of textual content and individual effort, attention, and information processing using machine learning algorithms. Israelsen is expected to contribute by identifying, cleaning, and parsing, and developing relevant databases for use in the analysis.

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The FBF seminar series ‘Finance in the Tuscan Hills’ focuses on financial sector issues and aims to bring together researchers from across the EUI community, who share an interest in these subjects.