AQR Top Finance Graduate Award recognizes HEC PhD Noémie Pinardon-Touati amongst the most promising finance PhD graduates in 2022

Congratulations to Noémie Pinardon-Touati, one of the 6 winners of the 2022 AQR (Applied Quantitative Research) Top Finance Graduate Award. This prestigious prize rewards the six best students in finance in the world selected by a jury of absolutely top academics in the field of financial economics. 

Noémie will will present her paper "The Crowding Out Effect of Local Government Debt: Micro- and Macro-Estimates research" on June 9, 2022, at the at the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters in Copenhagen.

Her research shows that local government debt crowds out corporate credit and investment. This crowding out effect significantly reduces the output multiplier of debt-financed local government spending.

Noémie has also recently been selected to participate in the REStud North American Tour 2022 where she will present the same paper. 

Abstract: Local government expenditures are increasingly financed by debt, mostly consisting of bank loans. I study the crowding out effect of these loans on corporate credit, investment, employment, and output, using French administrative data over 2006-2018. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in local government credit growth across banks, I show that when a local government borrows an additional €1 from a bank, this bank reduces corporate credit by €0.5, with significant effects on firm-level investment. Combining these reduced-form effects and a model, I show that crowding out reduces the output multiplier of debt-financed local government spending by 0.3. This is large compared to government spending multiplier estimates. Crowding out is driven by banks’ limited ability to expand their credit supply. These results show that constraints on financing supply reduce the stimulus effect of debt-financed government spending.
 

On June 20 she will defend her dissertation "Three essays on government intervention and corporate behavior" under the supervision of Professor Johan Hombert and will join the Department of Economics at Columbia University as Assistant Professor in July 2022. 

Winners 2022: (top row, left to right): Antonio Coppola, PhD from Harvard University, Diego Känzig, PhD from London Business School, and Francesca Bastianello, PhD from Harvard University, and (bottom row, left to right) Kerry Siani, PhD from Columbia Business School, Noémie Pinardon-Touati, PhD from HEC Paris, and Paul Fontanier, PhD from Harvard University.

About the award:
This award recognizes the most promising finance PhD graduates in 2022. Specifically, the award recognizes the graduates specializing in financial economics pursuing degrees in any field of study, e.g. business or economics, whose dissertation and broader research potential carry the greatest promise of making an impact on the finance practice and academia. See more here.