About

Ravi Bapna is the Curtis L. Carlson Chair Professor in Business Analytics and Information Systems and serves as the Academic Director of the Carlson Analytics Lab at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. He is closely affiliated with the MS in Business Analytics program and the Carlson Analytics Lab, where graduate students study a broad range of data analysis techniques and apply them to real business problems. These students are skilled in exploratory data visualization, predictive analytics, programming, data engineering, machine learning methods, and more, emerging as data science professionals. Partner organizations have the opportunity to work with these talented students while supporting the educational mission of the programs. The faculty involved in the Analytics for Good Institute, including Ravi Bapna, bring expertise from various fields such as computer science, econometrics, strategy, and causal experimentation. The institute emphasizes impact, engagement, and gender equality, fostering collaboration among faculty scholars from across the Carlson School and beyond to advance research and practical applications in analytics and data-driven decision-making.

Research topics

• Economics
• Microeconomics
• Finance
• Business
• Monetary economics
• Industrial organization
• Accounting

Selected publications

• Soft Collateral, Bank Lending, and the Optimal Credit Registry

  Management Science · 2026-05-05

  articleSenior author

  We study the design of an optimal credit registry in a general equilibrium steady-state setting where borrowers can default strategically and future access to credit markets serves as soft collateral to enforce loan repayment. We endogenize the probabilities for exclusion after default and subsequent reinstatement of clean credit records. When there are sufficient funds, optimal credit stringency is as loose as possible, subject to borrowers’ incentive constraints. When there are insufficient funds, credit stringency is driven by the need to equilibrate nonexcluded borrowers with available funds, and it increases as the imbalance grows. We examine how population growth, mortality, and persistence affect our results. Finally, we compare the simple two-tier scheme with the three-tier scheme and characterize solutions to a general N-tier registry. We show that a more graduated registry is not necessarily a better one. This paper was accepted by Will Cong, finance.

  PublisherDOI

• Does Bank Monitoring Reduce Corporate Misreporting? Evidence from Foreign Bank Entry in China

  Management Science · 2024-09-03 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  We propose a model of bank monitoring and borrower financial misreporting. Using the staggered liberalization of the banking sector in China as a natural experiment, we find that, consistent with the model’s prediction, entry by more efficient foreign banks reduces corporate misreporting fraud. Fraud reduction is greatest among borrowers of foreign banks, but fraud also drops among borrowers of domestic banks, suggesting a spillover effect. As predicted by the model, fraud reduction is greatest for borrowers with higher levels of fixed assets or lower levels of current assets. Our evidence suggests that improved bank monitoring reduces financial misreporting. This paper was accepted by Tomasz Piskorski, finance. Funding: M. Li acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation of China [Project 71402078] and the Social Science Foundation of Tsinghua University [Project 2013WKZD004]. Supplemental Material: The online appendices and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.02414 .

  PublisherDOI

• Loans and Lies: Does Bank Monitoring Reduce Corporate Misreporting?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Industry informational interactions and corporate fraud

  Journal of Corporate Finance · 2021 · 20 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Business
  • Accounting
  • Monetary economics
  PublisherDOI

• Monitoring in Originate-to-Distribute Lending: Reputation versus Skin in the Game

  Review of Financial Studies · 2021 · 13 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Business
  • Monetary economics
  • Finance

  Abstract Banks face liquidity and capital pressures that favor selling off the loans they originate, but loan sales undermine their monitoring incentives. A bank’s loan default history is a noisy measure of its past monitoring choices, which can serve as a reputation mechanism to incentivize current monitoring. In equilibrium, higher reputation banks monitor (weakly) more intensively; if retention is credible, they generally retain less of the loans they originate. Monitoring is difficult to sustain in periods with uncommonly large spikes in loan demand (“booms”), especially for low-reputation banks, which are more likely to accommodate boom demand and forgo monitoring.

  PublisherDOI

• Cheating in China: Corporate Fraud and the Role of Financial Markets

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020-01-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Do banks still monitor when there is a market for credit protection?

  Journal of Accounting and Economics · 2019-07-24 · 49 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Bank Capital, Borrower Power, and Loan Rates

  Review of Financial Studies · 2019-02-14 · 59 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract We examine how bank capital and borrower bargaining power affect loan spreads. Consistent with previous studies, higher bank capital has a negative impact on loan rates, but borrower cash flow has a significant effect on this impact: compared with high-capital banks, low-capital banks charge more for borrowers with low cash flow, but offer greater marginal discounts as these borrowers’ cash flow rises. These effects are largely focused on more bank-dependent borrowers. We find some evidence that low-capital banks charge a higher premium for bank-dependent borrowers’ systematic risk, but not for their total equity risk or default risk. Received January 27, 2015; editorial decision July 7, 2018 by Editor Philip Strahan. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Do Banks Still Monitor When There Is a Market for Credit Protection?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2018-01-01 · 14 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Liquidity Provision, Bank Capital, and the Macroeconomy

  Journal of money credit and banking · 2017-01-27 · 145 citations

  articleSenior author

  New bank equity must come from somewhere. In general equilibrium, raising bank capital requirements means either that banks produce less short‐term debt (as debt holders must become shareholders), or short‐term debt is not reduced and the banking system acquires nonbank equity (as the shareholders in nonbanks become shareholders in banks). The welfare effects involve a trade‐off because bank debt is special as it is used for transactions purposes, but more bank capital can reduce the chance of bank failure (producing welfare losses).

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Tracy Yue Wang

  University of Minnesota

  27 shared

• Gary Gorton

  Yale University

  19 shared

• Charles M. Kahn

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  18 shared

• Anne Gron

  15 shared

• João A. C. Santos

  13 shared

• Vijay Yerramilli

  University of Houston

  11 shared

• Chenyu Shan

  11 shared

• Dragon Yongjun Tang

  11 shared