About

Gregor Matvos is a Howard Berolzheimer Chair in Finance at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and serves as an Editor of The Review of Financial Studies. His research interests include financial intermediation, household finance, real estate, and corporate finance. Matvos has published in several leading journals such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, Econometrica, and the Journal of Finance. His work has been featured in major media outlets including Bloomberg, the Economist, the Financial Times, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, and has had a direct impact on financial regulation. Born and raised in Slovenia, he earned a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and a PhD in Business Economics from Harvard University. His academic career includes positions at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Chicago, where he served as a Professor and Associate Professor of Finance. His research focuses on financial intermediation, household finance, real estate, and corporate finance, with applied insights into these areas.

Research topics

• Financial system
• Economics
• Business
• Monetary economics
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Macroeconomics
• Social psychology
• Economic growth
• Demographic economics
• Law
• Finance
• Keynesian economics
• Engineering
• Criminology
• Chemistry

Selected publications

• Private Credit, Balance Sheets and Financial Stability

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Financial Sanctions and the Global Payments Network

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Private Credit, Balance Sheets and Financial Stability

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2026-03-01 · 1 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We document new evidence on the capitalization, funding structure, and performance of private credit funds using comprehensive fund-and asset-level data covering most of the industry.Private credit funds are highly capitalized, with equity typically accounting for 65-80% of total assetsmore than six times the capitalization of U.S. banks, where equity represents about 10%.Debt usage is moderate and largely reflects bank credit lines used for liquidity management.Fund lives average 10-12 years, while underlying loan maturities are generally shorter, implying little or no maturity mismatch-unlike banks, which fund long-term assets with short-term callable deposits.Private credit portfolios are diversified across industries, geographies, and credit strategies, reducing exposure to correlated shocks.Performance data show positive average net annualized returns with limited downside risk to creditors, as losses are largely borne by equity investors.Overall, private credit funds appear conservatively structured and unlikely to pose systemic risks comparable to traditional banks under their current balance-sheet configurations.We conclude by discussing potential vulnerabilities that could emerge as the sector grows, including governance and disclosure frictions, stress-period dynamics, bank-nonbank linkages, and the transmission of losses through limited partner balance sheets and retail investment vehicles.

  PublisherDOI

• Who Pays for Payments?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Who Pays for Payments?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Who Pays for Payments?

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2026-04-01

  reportOpen access

  We use novel data on the composition and cost of payments across U.S. merchants to quantify consumer redistribution in the payment system.Cards charge interchange fees to merchants to fund consumer rewards.When merchants raise prices for all consumers in response to these costs, users of low-cost payment methods (e.g., cash and debit) cross-subsidize high-reward credit card users who shop at the same merchant.This standard mechanism implicitly assumes that consumers using different payment methods shop at the same merchants and that merchants face similar fees.We show instead that incidence depends on the joint distribution of payment choices across merchants.We document two key forces that shape redistribution.First, consumer sorting-where consumers who use different payment methods shop at different merchants-limits the exposure of cash and debit users to the effects of high interchange fees.Second, interchange fees vary across merchants; where users of different payment methods overlap, such as at large grocery stores, fees are lower due to sector discounts and private negotiations.We embed these forces in a sufficient-statistics framework that maps observed heterogeneity directly into redistribution.We estimate that interchange fees transfer approximately $30 billion every year from cash and debit users to credit card users.Consumer sorting and merchant fee heterogeneity reduce the magnitude of this regressive transfer by 25%, but do not eliminate it.Finally, we show that both the Durbin Amendment and the rise of premium credit cards have been regressive, highlighting how policy and innovation can reshape the incidence of platform fees.

  PublisherDOI

• Monetary Tightening, Commercial Real Estate Distress, and US Bank Fragility

  Journal of Political Economy Macroeconomics · 2025-08-19 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Arbitration with Uninformed Consumers

  The Review of Economic Studies · 2025-02-10 · 2 citations

  article

  Abstract This article studies the impact of the arbitrator selection process on consumer outcomes. Using data from consumer arbitration cases in the securities industry over the past two decades, where we observe detailed information on case characteristics, the randomly generated list of potential arbitrators presented to both parties, the selected arbitrator, and case outcomes, we establish several motivating facts. These facts suggest that firms hold an informational advantage over consumers in selecting arbitrators, resulting in industry-friendly arbitration outcomes. We then develop and calibrate a quantitative model of arbitrator selection in which firms hold an informational advantage in selecting arbitrators. Arbitrators, who are compensated only if chosen, compete with each other to be selected. The model allows us to decompose the firms’ advantage into two components: the advantage of choosing pro-industry arbitrators from a given pool and the equilibrium pro-industry tilt in the arbitration pool that arises because of arbitrator competition. Selecting arbitrators without the input of firms and consumers would increase consumer awards by $60,000 on average relative to the current system. Forty percent of this effect arises because the pool of arbitrators skews pro-industry due to competition. Even an informed consumer cannot avoid this pro-industry equilibrium effect. Counterfactuals suggest that redesigning the arbitrator selection mechanism for the benefit of consumers hinges on whether consumers are informed. Policies intended to benefit consumers, such as increasing arbitrator compensation or giving parties more choice, would benefit informed consumers but hurt the uninformed.

  PublisherDOI

• The Secular Decline of Bank Balance Sheet Lending

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Book Value Risk Management of Banks: Limited Hedging, Htm Accounting, and Rising Interest Rates

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Amit Seru

  237 shared

• Tomasz Piskorski

  Columbia University

  107 shared

• Mark Egan

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  99 shared

• Greg Buchak

  94 shared

• Erica Xuewei Jiang

  19 shared

• Alı Hortaçsu

  15 shared

• João Granja

  University of Chicago

  13 shared

• Zhiguo He

  13 shared

Awards & honors

• Sidney J. Levy Teaching Award, 2023-2024
• Editor, Review of Financial Studies, 2020-2026
• Editor, Review of Corporate Finance Studies, 2016-2020
• Associate Editor, Journal of Finance, 2016
• Associate Editor, Review of Corporate Finance Studies, 2015-…