Shan Zhao, Associate Professor of Finance

The goal of investment is to achieve a high return rate. According this standard, which investment project a dog will choose? The figure below tells you the answer.

4. Fun Research

Why there are few CEOs born in summer?

“The Relative-Age Effect and Career Success: Evidence from Corporate CEOs,” with Qianqian Du and Maurice Levi, Economics Letters 117 (2012), 660-662.

Baby face CEOs: “A Corporate Beauty Contest"

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1571469

Can Financial Engineering Cure Cancer? (note that Andrew Lo is a finance professor at MIT)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYL6oX6aVPM

Companies with short, easy to pronounce names have higher breadth of ownership, greater share turnover, and lower transaction price impacts from "The Company Name Fluency, Investor Recognition, and Firm Value"

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1777256

All too often, finance is criticized as merely a tool of the rich. But the book of Rajan and Zingales, too great financial scholars, suggests, on the contrary, finance give the poor opportunities to grow and to overtake incumbents. http://www.savingcapitalism.com/

-- The paper that predicts financial crisis:

Raghuram G. Rajan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raghuram_Rajan ) 2005 "Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?"

http://www.nber.org/papers/w11728

-- The application of corporate finance theory to human smuggling:

Guido Friebel and Sergei Guriev, 2006. "Smuggling Humans: A Theory of Debt-financed Migration," Journal of the European Economic

http://www.iza.org/en/webcontent/publications/papers/viewAbstract?dp_id=1025

--Firm Performance declines when CEOs are in hospitals:

“Estimating the Value of The Boss: Evidence from CEO Hospitalization Events” by Morten Bennedsen, Francisco Perez-Gonzalez, Wolfenzon.

http://www0.gsb.columbia.edu/whoswho/more.cfm?&uni=dw2382&pub=5556

**Jay Ritter, "Forensic Finance", Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 22, No. 3, (Summer 2008) pp. 127-147. http://bear.warrington.ufl.edu/ritter/ForensicFinance.pdf

Investor mood affects asset prices. Soccer World Cup elimination leads to a next-day abnormal return of -49bp on the national index. "Sports Sentiment and Stock Returns"

Journal of Finance, August 2007 http://finance.wharton.upenn.edu/~aedmans/SteelJF.pdf

To solve the so-called equity premium puzzle, one researcher has gone digging through the garbage. The idea is to use garbage to measure consumption "Asset Pricing with Garbage"

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1345470

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2009/07/17/using-garbage-to-measure-consumption/

Cohen, Lauren H., Christopher J. Malloy, and Andrea Frazzini. Sell-Side School Ties. Journal of Finance 65, no. 4 (August 2010): 1409-1437.

http://www.people.hbs.edu/lcohen/pdffiles/malcofrazII.pdf

From J. Ritter’s webpage: Harry Markopolos's famous 2005 memo to the U.S. SEC alerting the regulators to the Madoff Ponzischeme.

http://bear.warrington.ufl.edu/ritter/Markopolos.pdf

Is Sound Just Noise?

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~shumway/papers.dir/outcry.html

"Are CEOs rewarded for luck?" by M Bertrand, S Mullainathan - The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2001

http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/marianne.bertrand/research/papers/ceo_luck_qje.pdf

David Yermack, 2013, Is Bitcoin a Real Currency? An Economic Appraisal

http://ssrn.com/abstract=2361599