Selected Publications
A Hidden Hand in Corporate Lobbying (Ph.D. Dissertation)
Financial Management, 2022, 51, 357–397.
Top 3 Papers in Summer 2022 Issue
Institutional investors facilitate portfolio firms' lobbying activities by exerting political influence to improve lobbying outcomes and protect political information.
Buffing Firm Innovation by Lobbying (with Juntai Lu)
Journal of Corporate Finance, 2024, 85, 102557.
Corporate lobbying buffs firm innovation outcomes by improving the political environment through transmitting valuable information to politicians.
Partisanship, Optimism, and Firm Innovation (with Juntai Lu and Honglin Ren)
Financial Management, forthcoming.
Partisan alignment with the party in power fosters firm executives' optimism which stimulates more innovative projects and better innovation outcomes.
Blue versus Red: Partisan Firm Leaders and Corporate Culture (with Honglin Ren)
Business & Politics, forthcoming.
Firms led by partisan leaders exhibit wide partisan divides on various corporate cultural values.
The Predictive Power of Nelson-Siegel Factor Loadings for the Real Economy (with Yang Han and Jun Ma)
Journal of Empirical Finance, 2021, 64, 95–127.
The time-varying loading factor λt in the arbitrage-free Nelson Siegel (AFNS) model has strong predictive power for real economic activity and is related to the market perception of economic risk and uncertainty.
Working Papers
Political Partisanship and Firm Value (with Honglin Ren)
Shared partisanship of firm executives with the U.S. president plays a prominent role in shaping how firms are governed in U.S. two-party politics.
Does Environmental Lobbying Create Firm Value? (with Chunbo Liu and Honglin Ren)
Firms use environmental lobbying as a tool to manage regulatory risk, and brown firms seem to tilt the legislation toward their favors.
Prosocial CEOs and Social Accountability: Evidence from Firm Political Donations (with Honglin Ren and Wenqiao Zhang)
Firms with prosocial CEOs actively enhance corporate social accountability by supporting African-American and Gun-Control politicians.
The Orientation of Corporate Political Activities (with Honglin Ren)
Corporate political activities (CPAs) are along partisan lines, which persist over the past 30 years. Executive partisanship is a key determinant of the orientation of CPAs.
Ethics and Corporate Lobbying (with Shawn Mobbs and Sandra Mortal)
Semifinalist for the 2019 FMA Best Paper Award in Corporate Finance
Government regulation on unethical lobbying practices improves the lobbying environment, which benefits firms that lobby on average, makes lobbying efficient, and motivates firms to hire politically connected directors.