​I am an Assistant Professor in Finance at Tilburg University.
My research interests are in financial intermediation, macro-finance and political economy.  

I co-organize PolEconFin, an initiative aimed at connecting researchers interested in political economy of finance through an online platform and a CEPR conference series. The second edition of the conference will take place on November 12th 2022 in Amsterdam and will focus on the Political Economy of Central Banks (see the call for papers).
​
Email:
m.a.rola-janicka@uvt.nl

Selected working papers

Too Levered for Pigou? A Model of Environmental and Financial Regulation
joint with Robin Döttling, my contribution has been prepared under the Lamfalussy Fellowship Programme sponsored by the ECB

​We analyze jointly optimal emission taxes and financial regulation in the presence of environmental externalities and financial constraints. If polluters are financially constrained, optimal emission taxes are below the Pigouvian benchmark (equal to the social cost of emissions). This wedge implies that emission taxes alone cannot implement a constrained efficient allocation. Welfare can be improved by complementing emission taxes with leverage regulation, which provides a rationale for considering climate risks in financial regulatory frameworks. Our model highlights that transition and physical risks have opposite implications for how emission taxes interact with financial constraints. When borrowers are exposed to the physical risk of environmental damages the effect of emission taxes on financial constraints can revert because lower emissions increase asset values and financial slack. As a result, the optimal emission tax may be above the Pigouvian benchmark if the impact of physical risk on asset values is sufficiently large.
​
Presentations: Toulouse School of Economics, Finance Theory Group Member Meeting , Financial Regulation - Going Green Workshop (by co-author), 5th Bristol Banking Workshop (by co-author), HU Berlin, BSE Summer Forum, Vienna Festival of Finance Theory (scheduled), The Oxford Saïd and Risk Center at ETH Zürich Macro-finance Conference (scheduled), Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics (scheduled), European Commission Annual Research Conference 2022 (poster, scheduled)

The Political Economy of Prudential Regulation
2020 Best Job Market Paper in Finance Theory

This paper introduces a voting model into a framework with negative borrowing externalities to study voter preferences for prudential regulation. While voting, agents account for the general equilibrium impact of prudential policy on future asset prices and consequently, their access to credit. They thus support a universal limit on current debt. Curbing over-borrowing restricts future declines in asset prices, distributing wealth from high- to low-income borrowers, so the former prefer lax regulation. Political imperfections, such as exemptions of politically connected borrowers, distort the marginal value of regulation. This leads connected borrowers to support excessively strict policy and other agents to vote for overly lax debt limits. If connections and income are correlated, political imperfections may reverse the policy preferences of high- and low-income borrowers.​
​
​Presentations: FIRS 2022, OxFit 2021, 7th FIN FIRE Workshop, Swiss Winter Conference on Financial Intermediation "Lenzerheide" 2021, CEPR Advanced Forum in Financial Economics, Workshop on Financial Intermediation and Corporate Debt Markets at Bundesbank, INSEAD, ECB Young Economist Competition 2020 (poster), Bonn University, Bank of England, Sveriges Riksbank, Queen Mary University of London, University of Bristol, KU Leuven, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, European Central Bank DG Research, Econometric Society Winter Meeting.

Publications

The Good, the Bad and the Missed Boom​
joint with Enrico Perotti, forthcoming at Review of Financial Studies

Some credit booms result in financial crises. While excessive risk taking is a plausible cause, many investors do not anticipate increasing risk. We show that credit booms may be misunderstood as productivity-driven, due to opaque bank assets which disguise risk incentives. Balanced funding relative to productive prospects can sustain prudent lending (good boom), while funding imbalances may induce high risk exposure and boost asset prices (bad boom), or lead to asset under-pricing and insufficient lending (missed boom). Rational agents drawing inference from prices make mistakes that can amplify the effect of funding imbalances and propagate risk.

On the Interaction Between Different Bank Liquidity Requirements
joint with Markus Behn and Renzo Corrias, ECB Macroprudential Bulletin October 2019 Issue 9

The post-crisis regulatory framework introduced multiple requirements on banks’ capital and liquidity positions, sparking a discussion among policymakers and academics on how the various requirements interact with one another. This article contributes to the discussion on the interaction of different regulatory metrics by empirically examining the interaction between the liquidity coverage ratio (LCR) and the net stable funding ratio (NSFR) for banks in the euro area. The findings suggest that the two liquidity requirements are complementary and constrain different types of banks in different ways, similarly to the risk-based and leverage ratio requirements in the capital framework. This dispels claims that the LCR and the NSFR are redundant and underlines the need for a faithful and consistent implementation of both measures (and the entire Basel III package more broadly) across all major jurisdictions, to maintain a level playing field at the global level and to ensure that the post-crisis regulatory framework delivers on its objectives.