I am an assistant professor in the Finance and Business Economics Department at USC Marshall. I graduated with a PhD in Finance from NYU Stern in May 2024.
My research focuses on questions in banking and applied macroeconomics, using tools from the spatial economics and industrial organization literatures.
Research Interests:
Primary: Financial Intermediation and Banking, Applied Macroeconomics
Secondary: Spatial Economics, Industrial Organization, Climate Change
Contact Email: qmaingi@marshall.usc.edu
Main Publications and Accepted Papers
Propagation and Amplification of Local Productivity Spillovers [Official Publication][Online Appendix] [Bibtex] , with Xavier Giroud, Simone Lenzu, Holger Mueller
Econometrica, Volume 92 (No. 5), September 2024, Pages 1589--1619
Regional Banks, Aggregate Effects [Official Publication] [Official Online Appendix] [Replication Package][Bibtex]
Forthcoming, Journal of Financial Economics, Volume 176, February 2026, 104226
Lawrence G. Goldberg prize for outstanding dissertation in Financial Intermediation, NYU Stern (2024)
A Quantity Based Approach to Constructing Climate Risk Hedge Portfolios [Bibtex], with Georgij Alekseev, Stefano Giglio, Julia Selgrad, Johannes Stroebel
Accepted, Journal of Finance
Best Paper in Asset Pricing, SFS Calvancade (2022)
Two Sigma Award for Best Paper on Investment Management, WFA (2022)
Runner Up, ICPM Research Award (2023)
Working Papers
Credit Without Proximity: Informational Frictions and Unequal Gains from Technology [Draft available upon request] [Bibtex]: , with Erica Xuewei Jiang and Yeonjoon Lee.
We study how the organization of screening activity---and its endogenous response to economic and technological forces---affects informational efficiency, credit allocation, and the distribution of borrower risk. Using US administrative data linking loan officers to mortgage applications and loan performance, we document that local officers achieve higher screening precision and faster processing; the informational benefits of proximity accrue disproportionately to borrowers with higher observable risk; and lenders allocate labor elastically with respect to local wages, resulting in systematic spatial misallocation of underwriting capacity relative to mortgage demand. We develop and estimate a structural model in which lenders set prices before observing borrower-specific signals, borrowers self-select on posted rates, and loan officers of different screening precision generate information that determines loan approvals. Lenders compete in mortgage pricing and in labor markets for local and remote officers, endogenously allocating information production across markets. We find substantial baseline credit rationing—up to 15 percent in high-risk segments—with local officers eliminating roughly half of it while also reducing excessively risky approvals. A technology shock that raises the processing productivity of remote officers induces lenders to substitute away from local screening, lowering informational efficiency, increasing excessively risky approvals and expected defaults, and tightening rationing for marginal borrowers despite only modest reductions in interest rates.