​I am an Assistant Professor in Finance at Imperial College London. Prior to this I was at Tilburg University.

My research interests are in financial intermediation, political economy of finance and climate finance.  

I am a member of Finance Theory Group and a co-organizer of PolEconFin, an initiative aimed at connecting researchers interested in political economy of finance.  I am co-organizing the CEPR conference series on the Political Economy of  Finance, the next edition takes place on 20th of October in Rotterdam.
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Email:
m.rola-janicka@imperial.ac.uk 

Publications

The Good, the Bad and the Missed Boom​
joint with Enrico Perotti, The Review of Financial Studies, Volume 35, Issue 11, November 2022, pages 5025-5056

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.

Selected working papers

Too Levered for Pigou: Carbon Pricing, Financial Constraints and Leverage Regulation 
joint with Robin Döttling, my contribution has been prepared under the Lamfalussy Fellowship Programme sponsored by the ECB

We analyze jointly optimal carbon pricing and leverage regulation in a model with financial constraints and endogenous climate-related transition and physical risks. The socially optimal emissions tax is below the Pigouvian benchmark (equal to the direct social cost of emissions) when emissions taxes amplify financial constraints, or above this benchmark if physical climate risks have a substantial impact on collateral values. Additionally introducing leverage regulation can be welfare-improving only if tax rebates are not fully pledgeable. A cap-and-trade system or abatement subsidies may dominate carbon taxes because they can be designed to have a less adverse effect on financial constraints.​
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Selected Presentations: Toulouse School of Economics, Finance Theory Group Meeting, BSE Summer Forum, Vienna Festival of Finance Theory, Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics,  Imperial College London, Bank of Spain, HEC Paris, WFA (by co-author), CICF (by co-author), EFA (by co-author)

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 how income inequality affects voter preferences for prudential regulation and the resulting equilibrium policy. When voting agents account for the general equilibrium impact of prudential policy on future asset prices and their access to credit. Consequently, borrowers 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 laxer regulation. Imperfections in enforcement distort the marginal value of regulation, so that borrowers who anticipate exemptions support an excessively strict policy. Imperfect enforcement can interact with income inequality to reverse the direction of the policy conflict between high- and low-income borrowers.
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Selected Presentations: FTWebinar, FIRS 2022, OxFit 2021, 7th FIN FIRE Workshop, Swiss Winter Conference on Financial Intermediation "Lenzerheide" 2021, CEPR Advanced Forum in Financial Economics, INSEAD, ECB Young Economist Competition 2020 (poster), ECB DG Research.