Manav Chaudhary

I am a graduate student in the Joint Program in Financial Economics at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business and Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics. My research focuses on asset pricing, behavioral economics, intermediation, and regulation.


Contact: mchaudhary@chicagobooth.edu


You can find my CV here and learn about my research below.


I am on the 2024-2025 academic job market.

Job Market Paper

Regulator Beliefs

Financial regulations embody views on the behavior of economic and financial variables, which I term regulator beliefs. Using the life insurance setting, I develop new methods to measure regulator and firm beliefs. Regulator interest rate expectations are derived from the regulator's statistical model used for risk-based capital and policy reserve calculations, and insurer expectations are extracted from investor call transcripts using a large language model. Using this novel data, I document three facts: (i) regulator expectations, despite systematic errors, outperform professional forecasters; (ii) regulators and insurers significantly disagree on future yields; and (iii) regulators, though more accurate than insurers, make more updating errors, like underreacting to new information. Through two quasi-experiments, I show that regulator beliefs drive insurers' capital allocations—regulator belief mistakes passthrough to regulated firm decisions. Furthermore, regulator expectations shape insurer expectations they communicate to investors—highlighting the need to consider the regulatory environment when interpreting the beliefs of regulated institutions. Finally, using Federal Reserve stress tests, I illustrate the broader relevance of my findings by showing that banks adjust their asset allocations in response to shifts in regulator beliefs. Given the omnipresent role of regulator beliefs in modern regulatory frameworks for banks, insurers, and pension funds, my findings lay the groundwork for a broader research agenda connecting regulator beliefs to financial institution decisions, asset prices, and financial stability.

Working Papers

Corporate Bond Multipliers: Substitutes Matter
R&R at  Review of Financial Studies
(with Zhiyu Fu and Jian Li)

Many economic questions require estimating the price impact of demand shifts (multipliers) in the bond market. Corporate bonds have salient characteristics that distinguish close versus distant substitutes. We show that accounting for the heterogeneous substitutability between bonds is critical for estimating multipliers correctly. By allowing for heterogeneous substitution, we find that security-level multipliers are essentially zero—an order of magnitude smaller than the estimate ignoring heterogeneous substitutability. Nonetheless, portfolio multipliers are substantially larger and monotonically increase with the aggregation level. Furthermore, we find that the multiplier is larger for high-yield bonds, longer-maturity bonds, and bonds with greater arbitrage risks.


Inflation Expectations and Stock Returns
(with Ben Marrow)

How do inflation expectations affect stock returns, and what accounts for this relationship? We directly measure investors' expectations using traded inflation-indexed contracts and show that, post-2000, stocks offer positive returns in response to higher expected inflation: unconditionally, a 10 basis point increase in 10-year breakeven inflation is associated with a 1.1% increase in the value-weighted stock index. Using a wide range of approaches, we show that this positive relationship is almost entirely due to aggregate variations in expected excess returns rather than changes in firm cash flows (e.g., due to higher mark-ups) or fluctuations in risk-free rates (e.g., due to expected monetary policy response). Overall, a risk premium “proxy” mechanism appears to explain this dominant role of expected excess returns: higher long-term inflation expectations signal stronger future economic growth and reduced volatility.


Anatomy of the Treasury Market: Who Moves Yields?  (Draft coming soon)
(with Zhiyu Fu and Haonan Zhou)