Jennifer M. Walsh

Jennifer M. Walsh

Hello! I am a Ph.D. student in Business Economics at Harvard. My research fields are industrial organization and finance. I study banking, antitrust, and corporate governance.

I was supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and am affiliated with the Center for American Political Studies. I graduated from Harvard with an A.B. in Physics & Mathematics. Before starting my Ph.D., I was a management consultant at Bain & Company.

I am on the 2026-2027 job market.

Job Market Paper

  1. Capital Regulation as a Barrier to Bank Consolidation (with Nathan Kaplan) [PDF]

    While thousands of mergers have reshaped the United States banking sector since the 1990s, the U.S. still has more banks per capita than other large countries. We show that equity capital regulation has meaningfully depressed bank M&A activity by making leverage-increasing financing expensive. Using a 2001 policy change in accounting standards as an instrument for the post-merger regulatory capital of target banks, we find that a standard deviation increase in capital raises the probability of a bank being purchased within a year by approximately 50%. Estimating a structural model of banks choosing merger partners subject to capital constraints, we find that weakening capital requirements around M&A since 1992 would have led to more consolidation and 19% fewer operating banks in 2022. Fixed cost efficiencies realized from additional mergers are of similar magnitude to consumer welfare losses from lower competition in deposit and loan markets. However, pairing weakened requirements with additional antitrust screening could have retained efficiencies while protecting consumer surplus.

Working Papers

  1. How Do Nonprofits Use Cash Windfalls? Evidence from $5B in Unrestricted Donations [SSRN] Updated

    I use $5B of MacKenzie Scott's unrestricted gifts as a natural experiment to test the hypothesis of a “nonprofit starvation cycle” caused by donation use-restrictions. Comparing 643 recipients to similar nonrecipients with difference-in-differences, I find that recipients attracted additional donations, spent the entire gift within two years, and disbursed 20% of new spending as grants to others and 3% as executive compensation. In present value, $0.18 per dollar of the windfall was spent on executive pay. With a corporate-finance model of nonprofits maximizing charitable output subject to donation use-restrictions, the evidence casts doubt on the starvation cycle hypothesis.

  2. Quantifying Investor Pressure (with Sarah Robinson) [SSRN]

    How do investor preferences translate to changes in firm actions? We develop a firm-, time-, and topic-specific measure of investor preferences and their divergence from firm priorities using earnings call transcripts. This measure, which we call the 'focus gap,' captures the difference in attention to a given topic between the Q&A, which proxies for investor priorities, and the firm's presentation, which reflects firm executives' priorities. We show that the focus gap predicts firm actions. Specifically, a one standard deviation increase in the dividend focus gap is associated with a 0.4 p.p., or 4%, increase in dividends paid as a percent of firm market value within two years. The analogous repurchase focus gap raises repurchases made as a percent of firm market value by 0.3 p.p., or 2%, within one year, but reverts to zero by two years after the focus gap increase. We then develop a conceptual framework that generates two possible rationales for responsiveness to investor pressure: catering to increase short-term stock prices and learning about long-run value. Variation in incentives to cater to analysts suggests that catering to raise stock prices, as opposed to learning, drives responsiveness to the focus gap for dividend issuance and repurchases. Consistent with this interpretation, we find that focus gap-driven capital allocation decisions are associated with temporary stock price increases followed by subsequent reversals.

  3. Margin or Mission? The Effects of CEOs on Hospital Outcomes (with Nagisa Tadjfar) [Contact for draft]

    This paper provides suggestive evidence from US hospitals that hospital CEOs tend to systematically increase or decrease charity care and other financial outcomes across the different hospitals. Using the large mobility of hospital CEOs in the US between 1996-2019, we classify CEOs into quartile cells based on percent changes in charity care and margins they are associated with across their hospitals of employment. For each hospital-CEO pair, we construct leave-one-out quartile cells to classify CEOs based on changes they are associated with at other hospitals for each outcome. Within 3 years of the appointment of a “top quartile” CEO who is associated with increased charity care at other hospitals, the share of expenses devoted to charity care increases by 65% relative to hospitals who hire first, second, or third quartile CEOs. We also find large and significant effects on outcomes such as total margin, gross revenue, and occupancy. Hospitals appointing CEOs with “top quartile” and “bottom quartile” effects on charity care and margins are not on differential trends and are observationally similar.

Works in Progress

  1. Merger Review by Market Definition: Evidence from Banking (with Harry Cooperman)
  2. Banking in the Town Square (with Iris Li)


Publications (Pre-Economics)

  1. HiNT: a computational method for detecting copy number variations and translocations from Hi-C data (with Su Wang, Soohyun Lee, Chong Chu, Dhawal Jain, Peter Kerpedjiev, Geoffrey M. Nelson, Burak H. Alver & Peter J. Park)
    Genome Biology, 21(73), 2020
  2. High-resolution spectroscopic study of extremely metal-poor star candidates from the SkyMapper survey (with Heather R. Jacobson, Anna Frebel, José M. Peña, Qinsi Yu, Stefan Keller, Martin Asplund, Michael S. Bessell, Gary S. Da Costa, Anna F. Marino, John E. Norris, Brian P. Schmidt, Patrick Tisserand, David Yong, Andrew R. Casey, and Karin Lind)
    The Astrophysical Journal, 807(2), 2015
  3. Widespread Macromolecular Interaction Perturbations in Human Genetic Disorders (with Nidhi Sahni et al.)
    Cell, 161(3), 2015
  4. A Proteome-Scale Map of the Human Interactome Network (with Thomas Rolland et al.)
    Cell, 159(5), 2014