Shashwat Alok

Latest Updates

May 28 2026: Will present my work, "Willingness to Pay for Liquidity: Evidence from an Interest-Free, Tip-Based Cash Advance Platform," co-authored with Sumit Agarwal, Yen Teik Lee, and Bhashkar Mazumder, at the Boulder Summer Conference on Consumer Financial Decision Making (May 27–29, 2026) at the University of Colorado Boulder. Using 6.8 million applications from a FinTech that offers interest-free, voluntary, tip-based cash advances, we recover a direct revealed-preference measure of borrowers' willingness to pay for short-term liquidity and find that many voluntarily pay implicit interest rates comparable to those of traditional high-cost payday credit. High APRs are therefore not solely a supply-side phenomenon, so top-down price caps risk treating a symptom while restricting access without changing underlying demand. Simple modifications to choice architecture offer a behavioral-design alternative that can expand lender revenue while reducing per-borrower costs.

May 19 2026: Presented my work, "The Buy Now Pay Later Divide: Merchant Heterogeneity and Market Structure," co-authored with Pulak Ghosh, Ankit Kalda, and Chirasree Mitra, at the ABFER 2026 Annual Conference in Singapore. We show that BNPL operates as a two-sided platform that relaxes financial constraints on both consumer and merchant sides. Revenue effects are substantially larger for small, credit-constrained, and ex-ante cash-dependent merchants, driven by a formalization channel in which digitized cash flows unlock first-time access to formal credit. Larger merchants also benefit from market expansion on the consumer side, driven by relaxed liquidity constraints. Spillovers on non-adopters are an order of magnitude smaller than adopter gains, so BNPL predominantly expands the market rather than redistributing existing demand.

May 18 2026: Moderated the Welcome Dinner Keynote by Prof. Viral Acharya (NYU Stern) at the ABFER 2026 Annual Conference in Singapore. In his talk titled, "The Convenience Yield of US Treasuries: Can we take it for granted?", Viral argued that the convenience yield on US Treasuries is not a permanent gift of "exorbitant privilege" but an asset-pricing object that has to be earned through perceived monetary and fiscal stability. The April 2025 Tariff War and the March 2026 Iran Conflict show how quickly it can erode at the long end of the curve when the United States is itself the source of the macro shock.

March 2026: Discussant and Session Chair at the MFA's Annual Conference. In the paper "Data as Collateral: Open Banking for Small Business Lending," the author shows that open banking can expand credit for small businesses by changing the nature of collateralization. In the "Household Finance" session that I chaired, we had three terrific papers that collectively inform how data and technology are reshaping household credit — from the shadows of thin-file borrowers, to workers accessing wages before payday, to how fintech loans help expand access to mortgages. 

Jan 2026:  Gave a talk on "The art of building a research pipeline," at the 5th ICMM & DocColl 2026 held at IIM Amritsar

Dec 2025: Discussant at the 4th ISB-NBER Annual Conference. In their paper “Divine Catalysts: Religion and Portfolio Choices,” Maxime Bonelli, Pulak Ghosh, S. Lakshmi Naaraayanan, and Purnoor Tak exploit India’s Diwali Muhurat trading sessions to show that religiously framed cues meaningfully shift retail portfolios: Hindu investors trade and buy more, initiate new positions (rather than topping up existing ones), and concentrate their purchases in large, mature, low-volatility stocks that they hold longer.

Nov 2025: Presented my work, "Breaking Barriers to Financial Access: Cross-Platform Digital Payments and Credit Markets", at Ashoka University's Economics Seminar Series

Nov 2025: Keynote Speaker at Deloitte USI's Annual Innovation Event

Sept 2025: Presented my work, "Why do financially unconstrained individuals respond to higher credit limits? ", at the 4th Holden Conference, Indiana University

May 2025: Presenter and discussant at the FIRS 2025 conference in Seoul, Korea.

May 2025: Discussant at the ABFER 12th Annual Conference in Singapore. In their paper "Poverty Spreads in Deposit Markets," Arkodipta Sarkar and Emilio Bisetti document novel findings on systematic deposit-rate spreads across the income distribution. The same bank offers richer areas higher rates on identical deposit products. The thesis is that banks compete with other assets that high-income households invest in. Studies on banking competition need to consider competitive pressure from non-bank asset classes!

May 2025: Visiting Research Scholar at NUS Business School.

March 2025: Discussant at the WEFIDEV-RFS-CEPR 2025 conference. In their paper "Timing lumpy investments with informal bridge loans and clunky formal loans: Evidence from Thailand," Anil K. Jain, ROBERT M. TOWNSEND, and FAN WANG document novel and insightful findings on the role of informal moneylenders in facilitating productive investments. The thesis is that informal loans act as a bridge between two formal short-term loans (1-year duration), effectively increasing the duration of formal loans. Such formal-informal-formal bridges help finance longer-term capital investments.

March 2025: Co-organizer for the "ISB-CAFRAL Conference on The Impact of Digitalization on Households and Firms" at ISB's Mohali campus.