Hala Moussawi

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. I am on the 2024-2025 academic job market.

My research in public finance and financial intermediation examines the causal effects of government interventions in financial markets. My current work scrutinizes two applications of these interventions: municipal tax shields and global banking. 

In my job market paper, I evaluate the efficiency of state tax shields in municipal bonds. U.S. states exempt residents from taxation on the interest income of local municipal bonds. I use millionaire taxes to calibrate an equilibrium model of the municipal bond market with strategic setting of tax shields by state tax authorities. I show that state tax shields reduce local bond yield spreads but impose negative externalities on other states and distort risk-sharing across municipal investors. 

In other work, I show that the U.S. and China take markedly different approaches to their global banking regulation, and this discrepancy carries adverse consequences for the long-term dominance of Western banks. In ongoing follow-up work with coauthors, I delve deeper into the institutional characteristics of Chinese banks and the distinct roles of bank supervision versus regulation. 

This research builds on my previous work in the Research Department at the International Monetary Fund where, with coauthors, I estimated the cost of public interventions in 2008 to be approximately $1.6 trillion. 

I hold a B.A. in Financial Economics with a concentration in Mathematics, cum laude, from Columbia University.