Overview

When considering how households make investment decisions, Professor Egan became intrigued by the question, “What makes a bank ‘special’ when compared to other lending institutions?” Focusing on empirical industrial organization with applications to finance and banking, his research uses quantitative tools from the industrial organization literature to better understand the stability of the banking sector in the United States. Similarly, Professor Egan has studied bank value by estimating the productivity of a bank across its deposit-taking and lending activities. His research suggests that deposit productivity rather than lending productivity accounts for the bulk of bank value creation. In addition to banks, households turn to the financial advisory industry when making investments. Professor Egan has examined the investment decisions of retail consumers in a broker-intermediated market using a new retail bond data set, finding evidence indicating that the incentives of brokers distort consumer investment decisions and often direct consumers’ search toward inferior products. He also uses a novel dataset to document the extent of misconduct in the financial services industry and the associated labor market consequences. His research shows that one of every thirteen financial advisors in the United States has a past record of misconduct, and many are guilty of concentrated, or repeated, misconduct. Men are three times more likely to engage in misconduct than women, yet in the labor force, the future career opportunities of women who engage in misconduct are jeopardized to a greater extent than those of men.