Pranav Desai is an Assistant Professor of Finance at Nova School of Business & Economics
His research interests lie in the areas of behavioral finance, entrepreneurial finance, and innovation. His current research highlights the costs of biased decisions by regulators for firms.
Education
- Tilburg University, CentER Graduate School
PhD in Finance, 2016 - 2020 (Expected)
Research Master in Business - Finance, 2015 - 2016 - University College London
MSc in Economics, 2013 - 2014
Working Papers
- Biased Regulators: Evidence from Patent Examiners
Summary: In-group biases affect decisions of patent examiners and are costly to start ups and inventors.
Abstract: Are regulators biased? I show that in-group biases affect patent grant decisions, using a novel hand-collected biographical dataset on examiners at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. I find that examiners are more likely to grant patents to inventors from their own racial group or gender than to other applicants. I exploit the random assignment of examiners to applicants ensuring that differences in quality of applications cannot explain the results. The effects are more pronounced when group membership is salient such as in periods of high racial conflict and for examiners from Jim Crow Law states. Biased examiner decisions lower the quality of patents, startup formation, as well as firms’ likelihood of raising venture capital and going public. In sum, these findings suggest that biases of individual regulators might distort the allocation of economically important property rights such as patents.
Summary: When institutional investors pay less attention to a firm, analysts reduce their effort and issue more biased and erroneous forecasts.
Abstract: I exploit exogenous shocks to the attention of institutional investors to show that sell-side analysts decrease effort on a given stock when institutional investors are paying less attention. Reduced effort on one stock is associated with additional effort on other stocks covered by the same analyst at the same point in time, suggesting that analysts re-optimize effort allocation across the stocks they cover. My results provide new empirical evidence on the impact of institutional investors on the information supply of analysts. They also offer a way to think about “information dry-ups,” i.e., periods in which the information environment deteriorates for specific firms at specific times, because institutional investors fail to monitor and sell-side analysts reduce effort at the same time.
Teaching
- 2204 - Mergers, Acquisitions and Restructuring, Nova SBE Masters in Finance