Adam Sheridan defends his PhD thesis at the Department of Economics

Candidate: Adam Sheridan

Title

"Essays on Banks, Insurance, and Social Networks"

Time and venue

29 March 2019 at 14:00. University of Copenhagen, Centre for Health and Society, Øster Farimagsgade 5, 1353 Copenhagen K, building 26, CSS 26.2.21

Asssessment Committee
Professor David Dreyer Lassen, Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen, Denmark (chairman)
Senior Researcher Andreas Fagereng, Statistics Norway, Norway
Associate Professor Kaveh Majlesi, Lund University, Sweden

Abstract
This thesis consists of four self-contained chapters. In the first chapter, written together with Rajkamal Iyer, Thais Jensen, and Niels Johannesen, we provide empirical evidence of the distortive effects of too-big-to-fail guarantees on bank competition for retail deposits. In the second chapter, written together with Asger Lau Andersen, Amalie Sofie Jensen, Niels Johannesen, Claus Thustrup Kreiner, and Søren Leth-Petersen, we provide precise and comprehensive evidence on how households respond to unemployment shocks by linking multiple high-frequency administrative data sets from government agencies, covering the entire Danish population, with transaction-level data from a major bank. In the third chapter, written together with Asger Lau Andersen, and Niels Johannesen, we combine transaction-level customer records from a large retail bank with government registers in order to construct a unique dataset with high-frequency information on income, spending, and intra-family bank transfers and we use these data to produce new evidence on intra-family insurance. In the fourth and final chapter, I demonstrate how the increasing popularity of mobile money transfer apps is generating population-scale data on real world social interactions, presenting researchers with an opportunity to better comprehend social networks and their role in social and economic behavior.