Welcome to my personal homepage. Below you will find my current research projects. CV 

Accepted and Published Papers:

Debt Contract Enforcement and Conservatism: Evidence from a Natural Experiment (with Nan Li). 2018. Journal of Accounting Research, 56 (5), 1383-1416. [JAR] [Online Appendix] 

Information Arrival, Delay, and Clustering in Financial Markets with Dynamic Freeriding (with Tadashi Hashimoto). 2020. Journal of Financial Economics, 138 (1), 27-52. [JFE] [Online Appendix]  

Voluntary Disclosure with Evolving News (with Byeong-Je An). 2021. Journal of Financial Economics, 140 (1), 21-53. [JFE] 

Strategic Timing of IPOs and Disclosure: A Dynamic Model of Multiple Firms (with Ilan Guttman). 2021. The Accounting Review, 96 (3), 27-57. [TAR] [Online Appendix] 

No Reliance on Guidance: Counter-Signaling in Management Forecasts (with Carlos Corona and Ronghuo Zheng).  2021. RAND Journal of Economics, 52 (1), 207-245. [RAND] 

Aggressive Boards and CEO Turnover (with Tadashi Hashimoto). 2021. Journal of Accounting Research, 59 (2), 437-486. [JAR] [Online Appendix] 

IPO Peer Effects (with Richard Thakor). 2022. Journal of Financial Economics, 144 (1), 206-226. [JFE] [Online Appendix]

Do Mandatory Disclosure Requirements for Private Firms Increase the Propensity of Going Public? (with Richard Thakor). 2022. Journal of Accounting Research, 60 (3), 755-804. [JAR][Online Appendix]  

Managerial Myopia, Earnings Guidance, and Investment (with Tadashi Hashimoto). 2023. Contemporary Accounting Research, 40 (1), 166-195. [CAR][Online Appendix]  

Strategic Complexity in Disclosure (with Kevin Smith). 2023. Journal of Accounting and Economics, 76 (2-3), 101635. [JAE] 

Sequential Reporting Bias (with Ilan Guttman and Evgeny Petrov).  The Accounting Review, forthcoming.

Working Papers:

Merchants of Death: The Effect of Credit Supply Shocks on Hospital Outcomes (with Pinar Karaca-Mandic, Xuelin Li, and Richard Thakor). Conditionally accepted, American Economic Review.

Abstract: This study examines the link between credit supply and hospital health outcomes. Using detailed data on hospitals and the banks that they borrow from, we use bank stress tests as exogenous shocks to credit access for hospitals that have lending relationships with tested banks. We find that affected hospitals shift their operations to enhance their profit margins in response to a negative credit shock, but reduce the quality of their care to patients across a variety of measures. In particular, affected hospitals exhibit significantly lower attentiveness in providing timely and effective treatment and procedures, and are rated substantially lower in patient satisfaction. This decline in care quality is reflected in health outcomes: affected hospitals experience a significant increase in risk-adjusted, unplanned 30-day readmission rates of recently discharged patients and in risk-adjusted 30-day patient mortality rates. Overall, the results indicate that access to credit can affect the quality of healthcare hospitals deliver, pointing to important spillover effects of credit market frictions on health outcomes. 

Endogenous Offer Arrival in the Market for Lemons (with Tadashi Hashimoto)

Abstract: We allow buyers to choose the timing of offers in a dynamic adverse selection model with a single seller. Buyers have private information and can delay their one-time private offers to learn from other buyers by observing trading behavior. We find that the equilibrium exhibits maximum delay in the sense that all buyers delay their offers until the last period. In the infinite horizon limit, buyers do not make offers in finite time. Moreover, the presence of many buyers exacerbates delay, leading to a high probability of delay in trade even under optimistic initial beliefs. The results suggest that endogenizing the timing of offer arrival in adverse selection markets critically affects equilibrium behavior.

Mandatory vs. Voluntary ESG Disclosure, Efficiency, and Real Effects (with Byeong-Je An).

Abstract: In this study, we examine the equilibrium effects of ESG quality disclosure in both voluntary and mandatory regimes. A firm manager makes a private investment decision in an environmentally friendly or unfriendly project that affects future cash flows and the social externalities produced by the firm. We build from Shin (2003) and allow an informed manager to make potentially disparate disclosure decisions on multiple interdependent outcomes---future financial performance and ESG quality. We find that mandating ESG quality disclosure results in over-investment in the sustainable technology. That is, the manager often implements sustainable investment even though this is overall less preferred by shareholders. Moreover, a voluntary disclosure regime can be more efficient for investment than a mandatory regime, from the perspective of shareholders. The results also show that mandating ESG disclosure leads to a greater prevalence of sustainable investing. The results provide insights that can be relevant for public policy considerations regarding mandatory ESG disclosure as well as implications that can help to guide empirical research.

When Private Equity Comes to Town: The Local Economic Consequences of Rising Healthcare Costs (with Jash Jain and Richard Thakor) 

Abstract: We examine the effect of increased healthcare costs on local economic conditions. We use private equity (PE) buyouts of U.S. hospital systems as a shock to the healthcare costs faced by firms in affected areas. Our primary identification strategy consists of the PE acquisition of a large-scale hospital chain, with hospitals dispersed across various communities in the U.S. We supplement this strategy with broader evidence including all PE buyouts of hospitals over a longer sample period. We provide evidence that PE buyouts of hospital chains result in higher healthcare insurance premiums paid by firms, and such rises in premiums lead to higher business bankruptcies, an increase in business loan volume, slower employment and establishment growth, and lower wages. We additionally provide evidence that increases in healthcare costs result in firms being more vulnerable to the financial crisis, suggesting that the negative economic consequences of rising healthcare costs are due to weakened firm balance sheets which cause firms to be more susceptible to negative economic shocks.

Mandatory vs. Voluntary Disclosure in the Dynamic Market for Lemons (with Shunsuke Matsuno)

Abstract: We consider a dynamic adverse selection setting where a privately informed seller can choose to reveal or withhold past trade information to privately informed buyers. Buyers naturally receive less information when the seller can strategically withhold negative news relative to a setting where current buyers always observe the seller's history of trade, i.e., mandatory disclosure. Despite the informational disadvantage, we find that strategic disclosure by the seller can be a Pareto improvement and welfare-increasing relative to mandatory disclosure, under which past trade is always disclosed. This occurs because voluntary disclosure can attenuate the seller's incentive to engage in destructive signaling and can lead to more efficient trade.

Observational Learning, Endogenous Timing, and Information Acquisition.

Abstract: This study investigates a dynamic model of observational learning where the ordering of actions and agents' information endowments are endogenously determined. Agents are probabilistically informed and can increase their informedness through information acquisition. The main results show that agents choose to be imperfectly informed, even when information acquisition is costless.  This arises from the incentive to induce a more timely action by the other agent. Additionally, information acquisition is decreasing in the underlying variance of the state variable. The results share features of the data with the sell side security analyst industry and offer novel empirical predictions.