Research Interests

Fixed-income, mutual funds, market fragility, portfolio management.

Publications

Qin, Nan, and Lei Zhou. "Are investor-paid credit ratings superior?" Financial Management 54, no. 1 (2025): 53-87.

• Investor-paid ratings are not superior to issuer-paid ratings in predicting defaults or reducing rating inflation, and they elicit weaker market responses.

Huang, Jingzhi, Nan Qin, and Ying Wang. "Breadth of ownership and the cross-section of corporate bond returns." Management Science 70, no. 9 (2024): 5627-6482.

• Short-sale constraints and divergence of opinions among bond mutual funds lead to temporary overpricing of corporate bonds, especially riskier ones.

Qin, Nan, and Vijay Singal. "Effect of high-frequency trading on mutual fund performance." The Financial Review 58, no. 2 (2023): 369-394.

• HFT reduces mutual fund performance primarily by bidding up liquid stock prices rather than by increasing trading costs.

Qin, Nan, and Vijay Singal. "Equal-weighting and value-weighting: which one is better?" Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting 58 (2022): 743–768.

• Mispricing-driven return biases lead equal-weighted portfolios to outperform value-weighted portfolios, even after accounting for trading costs and taxes.

Qin, Nan, and Ying Wang. "Does portfolio concentration affect performance? Evidence from corporate bond mutual funds." Journal of Banking & Finance 123 (2021): 106033.

• Portfolio concentration improves bond fund performance, but primarily for funds with relatively liquid holdings, as liquidity costs can largely offset the benefits of concentration.

Chen, Yong, and Nan Qin. "The behavior of investor flows in corporate bond mutual funds." Management Science 63, no. 5 (2017): 1365-1381.

• Performance-chasing behavior in bond fund flows generates a non-convex flow–performance relationship, creating potential fragility.

Qin, Nan, and Vijay Singal. "Indexing and stock price efficiency." Financial Management 44, no. 4 (2015): 875-904.

• Indexing leads to less efficient stock prices, as evidenced by stronger post-earnings-announcement drift and greater deviations from the random walk.

Working Papers

"Private investments of corporate bond mutual funds", with Jaewon Choi and Qifei Zhu.

• Information opacity creates a return premium in Rule 144A bonds that mutual funds exploit to enhance performance, at the cost of greater liquidity risk and systemic fragility.

• Conferences: CICF (2026, scheduled), MFA 2026, FIFI 2025, FIRS 2025, FMA 2024.

"The performance of corporate bond mutual funds and the allocation of underpriced new issues", with Gjergji Cici, Scott Gibson and Pei Zhang.

• Active corporate bond funds earn alpha by capturing underpriced primary-market allocations, driven by underwriter relationships and strategic intra-family allocation.

• Conference: FMA 2023.

"Asset fire sales by corporate bond ETFs during the COVID-19 crisis", with Ying Wang.

• ETF fire sales amplify price pressure in corporate bonds during the COVID-19 crisis—particularly for investment-grade bonds—driven by feedback trading and alleviated by Fed intervention.

• Conference: FMA 2022.

Grants, Awards & Media Coverage

Summer Research Grant, NIU College of Business: 2025, 2023, 2019, 2018.

Best Paper Award for 2023, The Financial Review.

"Earnings jolt stocks like never before as ETFs, algos get blame." Bloomberg. October 17, 2016.

Teaching

MBA/EMBA/Master’s: Financial Analysis, Business Foundation (Finance), Risk Measurement.

Undergraduate: Investments, Corporate Finance, Introduction to Finance, Managerial Finance, Portfolio Management, Financial Institutions.

Average teaching evaluation over the past five years: 4.5/5.0

Education

2014 Ph.D. in Finance, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA        

2009 M.S. in Financial Engineering, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA

2007 B.E. in Computer Science, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China