Shohini Kundu

Biography

Shohini Kundu’s research focuses on financial intermediation, regulation, corporate finance and macroeconomics.

Following internships on Wall Street, Kundu was drawn to academic research, and she began studying areas with direct policy relevance. “I work on topics that have an action element,” she says. “I want to produce research that makes our financial system more robust.”

Kundu works on questions that aim to investigate the origins of financial fragility, as well as their direct and indirect effects on asset prices, corporate decisions and macroeconomy. Her recent work investigates how covenants, intrinsic to collateralized loan obligation (CLO) indentures, provide a mechanism through which idiosyncratic shocks may amplify to impose negative externalities on other, unrelated firms in CLO portfolios. “The real costs of fire sales can exacerbate credit crunches by reducing the availability of credit,” says Kundu. “In response, firms make financial and real adjustments. Contrary to traditional fire sale settings, I find CLOs fire-sell loans issued by riskier firms for contractual arbitrage purposes, exploiting loopholes in the design of covenants. We’ve seen this in the bankruptcies of major U.S. retailers, for instance.”

Kundu joined the faculty of UCLA Anderson School of Management in 2021 as an assistant professor of finance.