Curriculum Vitae
Employment
VU Amsterdam, Netherlands
Post-Doctoral Researcher
2026 – present
Education
IWH-Halle, Germany
Ph.D. in Economics
2020 – 2026
Friedrich-Schiller University Jena, Germany
M.S. in Economics
2017 – 2020
Saint-Petersburg State University, Russia
Candidate of Sciences in Economics
2015 – 2018
Saint-Petersburg State University, Russia
B.A. and M.A. in Economics
2008 – 2014
Working Papers
The Effect of Firm Subsidies on Credit Markets
with Michael Koetter, Lena Tonzer and Mirko Titze
R&R at the Journal of Banking & Finance
Quo Vadis? Bank Closures, Firm Performance, and New Bank-Firm Relationships
with Roman Goncharenko, Mikhail Mamonov, Steven Ongena, Svetlana Popova and Natalia Turdyeva
Invisible Lines: How Banks Use Firm Networks to Blunt Supervisory Tightening
with Koen Schoors and Mikhail Mamonov
Work In Progress
Political Lending Along the ‘Freedom Ladder’ JMP
Banks and Political Economy of Subsidy Allocation
with Michael Koetter
Healing Markets: Repression, Victimization and Market Reforms
with Iftekhar Hasan
Policy Reports
Kazakov, A. and Koetter M. (2024). Place-based Industrial Policies and Credit Markets: Evidence from the Former East and West Germany, EBRD Transition Report 2024-25 , 88-89
Research Interests
Political distortions in finance · Financial intermediation · Public policy
Conferences
NEFI Winter School — Riezlern, Austria
Feb. 2025
11th CGDE Doctoral Workshop — Dresden, Germany
Feb. 2024
SAFE Workshop ‘Challenges to the European Monetary and Fin. System’ — Frankfurt, Germany
Nov. 2023
29th Annual Meeting of the German Finance Association (DGF) — Stuttgart, Germany
Sep. 2023
EEA-ESEM-2022 — Milan, Italy
Aug. 2022
Tri-City Day-Ahead Workshop on the Future of Fin. Intermediation — Frankfurt, Germany
Aug. 2022
Annual Event of Finance Research Letters, 2022 CEMLA Conference (Online)
Apr. 2022
HU-IWH Joint Junior Seminar in Finance — Halle (Saale), Germany
Jan. 2022
Teaching
Teaching Assistant:
Macro Finance Policy Evaluation (Masters, Prof. Lena Tonzer), OvGU Magdeburg
Fall 2023
Money and Financial Markets (Masters, PD Markus Paasche), FSU Jena
Spring 2019
Advanced Public Finance (Masters, Prof. Silke Uebelmesser), FSU Jena
Spring 2019
Introduction to R (Masters, PD Holger Graf), FSU Jena
Spring 2018
Lecturer & Teaching Assistant:
Corporate Finance (Masters), SPBU Russia
2015 – 2016
Advanced Training
Banking Theory (Prof. David Martínez Miera), Barcelona BSE
Jul. 2023
Corporate Finance (Prof. Filippo Ippolito), Barcelona BSE
Jul. 2022
Other Information
Software: R · Stata · LaTeX · Python · JavaScript · Git · SQL
Languages: Russian (Native) · English (Fluent)
Past Employment
IWH-Halle, Germany
Research Assistant
2018 – 2020
Friedrich-Schiller University Jena, Germany
Research Assistant
2017 – 2020
Saint-Petersburg State University, Russia
Junior Lecturer
2015 – 2016
SberBank of Russia JSC, Russia
Credit Analyst (SME Lending)
2014 – 2016
References
Financial Markets Department
Halle Institute for Economic Research
Halle (Saale), Germany
+49 345 7753 727
michael.koetter@iwh-halle.de
Department of Economics
Ghent University
Ghent, Belgium
+32 (0) 0 9264 8974
koen.schoors@ugent.be
Financial Markets Department
Halle Institute for Economic Research
Halle (Saale), Germany
+49 341 9733 571
lena.tonzer@iwh-halle.de
Economics and Finance Department
Toulouse Business School
Toulouse, France
+33 (0) 6 8040 4301
m.mamonov@tbs-education.fr
Abstracts
Political Lending Along the ’Freedom Ladder’
What politicians do to stay in power? Existing work shows that incumbents maximize their re-election chances through cycles of fiscal spending or lending by state banks. Yet either of the two instruments has been studied in isolation and exclusively in democratic setting, while recent evidence documents that more countries are drifting toward authoritarian rule. This paper aims to generalize existing evidence by tracing evolution of fiscal and lending cycles along a country’s path down the ‘freedom ladder’. I further test whether political use of state banks goes beyond previously documented rent extraction and tactical redistribution but also serves to maintain political control, by using credit to offset center–periphery frictions and to respond quickly to episodes of social unrest. The analysis also requires bringing protests, repression, and propaganda into the empirical framework, which has not been done yet due to severe scarcity of such data. I aim to fill this gap by drawing on an arguably the most comprehensive hand-collected single-country dataset, combining polling-station election returns, granular regional fiscal records, and several million news texts classified using a fine-tuned LLM for propaganda detection, thereby providing insight into two decades of political life in Russia.
The Effect of Firm Subsidies on Credit Markets
Governments use firm subsidies to spark corporate investment, which may have repercussions in credit markets though. To test for potential credit market distortions due to this economic policy, we combine project-level information for the largest regional economic development program in German history with bank lending and firm borrowing over a long horizon: 1998–2019. Firm subsidies associate with larger lending volumes provided by banks. On the flip-side of credit markets, we document increased corporate borrowing. Importantly, we find neither evidence of excessively risky lending by banks nor crowding-out of credit to nonsubsidized firms. Firm subsidies support lending especially when credit constraints are elevated during the financial crisis. Overall, firm subsidies unfolded a positive multiplier effect in regional credit markets in our setting.
Invisible Lines: How Banks Use Firm Networks to Blunt Supervisory Tightening
This paper proposes a novel approach to measuring banking fraud, which we apply in a setting characterized by a sharp decline in regulatory forbearance, where the central bank shut down roughly two-thirds of Russian banks for fraudulent activity. We develop an empirical model of the supervisory decision rule governing unscheduled on-site inspections of suspect banks. Using predictions from the estimated rule, we define a treatment group of likely-to-be-inspected banks and implement de Chaisemartin and D’Haultfoeuille (2017) difference-in-differences regressions to estimate the effects of regulatory tightening. The baseline estimates show a substantial decline in treated banks’ asset size; however, this masks sharp heterogeneity. Using unique firm-ownership registry data, we measure each bank’s ego-network complexity and find that ownership networks are pivotal for adjustment to tighter supervision: weakly connected banks contract, cutting assets and equity, while well-connected banks expand their balance sheets and shift from consumer toward corporate lending.
Banks and Political Economy of Subsidy Allocation
This paper explores how partisan (mis)alignment shapes the outcomes of industrial subsidy policy within a federal democracy. We document a case where alignment appears to grease the wheels of policy implementation by facilitating the bottom-up information transfer about subsidy applicants through aligned local state banks. Drawing on granular subsidy data and hand-collected county-level election results spanning more than two decades (2000–2019), we find that counties aligned with their state governments receive substantially more subsidies, while these transfers translate into higher investment and employment, effectively serving the program’s intended purpose. The effects are more pronounced in counties with higher per capita lending by local state banks while being not related to lending by otherwise comparable control group of private cooperative banks.
Healing Markets: Repression, Victimization and Market Reforms
This paper investigates whether the development of market institutions can mitigate the historica "scars" left by political repressions. While a body of literature documents the persistence of historical effects in economic behavior, few studies explore the conditions under which these effects can be reversed. We hypothesize that marketization facilitates a critical transition from relational exchange—dependent on personal reputation and family background—to impersonal exchange governed by formal rules, credit scores, and transparent contracts. In doing so, market-oriented reforms may render the "victimization" of previous generations irrelevant to modern economic outcomes. Using a novel dataset of three million geocoded Stalin-era arrest records, we measure local repression intensity and match it to a newly constructed, registry-based Marketization Index covering more than 2,600 municipalities, which captures local firm dynamism (entry-to-exit rates), financial access, privatization, and the efficiency of contract enforcement and insolvency proceedings. We then examine the impact of historical repression on contemporary personal default rates and debt burdens. We aim to test whether regions with higher historical repression intensity exhibit higher rates of personal insolvency today, and crucially, whether the presence of robust market institutions attenuates this relationship. This study provides some of the first empirical evidence on the reversibility of historical scars, suggesting that competitive markets can "punish" the persistence of discrimination and victimization by prioritizing institutional merit over historical background.