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 and macroeconomics.


Contact: mchaudhary@chicagobooth.edu


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

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.