Thummim Cho
thummim@korea.ac.kr / Curriculum Vitae
Current Position: Associate Professor of Finance, Korea University (2024–Present)
Previous Position: Assistant Professor of Finance, LSE (Passed Interim Review, 2022)
Education: PhD in Economics, Harvard University (2017); BA, Cornell University (2007)
Research Interests: Asset Pricing, Macro-Finance
I help organize an annual workshop on valuations and long-term investing.
Working Papers
Equity Valuation Without DCF (coming soon) with Christopher Polk and Robert Rogers
SFS Cavalcade 2025 (scheduled)
Which Asset Pricing Model Do Firms Use? A Revealed Preference Approach with Amir Salarkia
Firm managers' net issuance decisions point to the CAPM as the factor model used by firm decision makers.
WFA 2025 (scheduled), SFS Cavalcade 2025 (scheduled), AFA 2022
The Present Value of Future Market Power (R&R, Review of Financial Studies) with Marco Grotteria, Lukas Kremens, and Howard Kung
Expected future market power is a key component of firm values according to a new present-value identity. Implications for recent macro-finance models.
Publications
Putting the Price in Asset Pricing (Journal of Finance, 2024) with Christopher Polk
A new framework for studying the cross-section of asset prices rather than average short-horizon returns.
Scale or Yield? A Present-Value Identity (Review of Financial Studies, 2024) with Lukas Kremens, Dongryeol Lee, and Christopher Polk
Decomposing firm-level cash-flow news into investment ("scale") vs. profitability ("yield") components generates empirical findings that discipline production-based asset pricing theories.
Turning Alphas into Betas: Arbitrage and Endogenous Risk (Journal of Financial Economics, 2020)
Arbitrage turns equity anomaly "alphas" (abnormal risk-adjusted returns) into endogenous "betas" with respect to intermediary asset pricing factors.
Updates Coming / Work in Progress
Heat as a Sedative: A Natural Experiment on Noise Trading (Updated draft coming)
AFA 2017, European Winter Finance 2019, Young Scholars Finance 2019, Midwest Finance Association 2020
Asset Pricing under Cross-Border Investment Frictions (2019) with Argyris Tsiaras
A tractable multi-country model of international equity markets provides a unified explanation for the cross-sections of comovements, risk premia, and home biases of different equity markets.
AFA 2020