Research

Working Papers

Shareholder Disagreement and Firm Performance: Evidence from ESG Divergence (Job Market Paper)

• Abstract: The growing importance of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues has led to divergent shareholder preferences, resulting in disagreements that challenge Fisher’s separation theorem by introducing non-pecuniary considerations into investment decisions. Such disagreements may enhance firm performance by increasing shareholder engagement, which provides managers with more comprehensive information for decision-making and improves monitoring quality. Using proxy voting records from mutual and pension funds, I construct novel measures of fund-level environmental and social (ES) preferences and quantify shareholder disagreement at the firm level. I provide evidence that firm-level shareholder ES disagreement is positively associated with firm performance, particularly among smaller, younger firms and those with below-average profiles. Exploiting fund mergers as exogenous shocks to firm ownership structure, I show that such a value-enhancing effect of ES disagreement is likely causal. I also develop a theoretical model to explain how shareholder disagreement on ES issues influences engagement with firm managers. 

• Presentations: 2nd HKU Next-Gen Finance PhD Workshop (2026), Junior Academics Research Seminars (JARS) in Finance (2026), 21st Annual Olin Finance Conference at WashU (PhD Poster Session), Financial Management Association 2025, Financial Management Association Doctoral Student Consortium 2025 and Special PhD Paper Presentations, Finance Theory Group Summer School (2025)

Relief Beliefs: Effects of Anticipated Student Loan Forgiveness (with Danial Salman)

• Abstract:  We study how households adjust consumption to news about future liabilities. Our setting is President Biden's August 2022 student loan forgiveness announcement, which promised $10,000 to $20,000 in debt relief to approximately 42 million borrowers. Because the announcement occurred during the student loan payment moratorium, it created an uncertain expected wealth shock without contemporaneously changing required payments. We link administrative data on debt relief eligibility and applications to high-frequency retail scanner data. We find that stores located in counties with a 1 percentage point higher share of eligible borrowers experienced a persistent 0.1% increase in weekly sales following the announcement. This response was absent in counties with high pre-announcement delinquency rates, consistent with delinquent borrowers being liquidity constrained and unable to smooth consumption. Sales subsequently declined in more-exposed counties when the Supreme Court blocked the plan. Together with widespread debt relief applications, the spending responses show that beliefs about ultimately unrealized debt relief affected households' behavior.

• Presentations: NBER Education Program Meeting 2026, SAFE Household Finance Workshop 2026, American Finance Association 2026 (poster), Financial Management Association 2025, Southern Finance Association 2025, Inter-Finance PhD Seminar

• Semifinalist for FMA 2025 Annual Meeting Best Paper Award

Working in Progress

The Disappearance of Radical Innovation: Evidence from Venture-Funded Start-Ups (with Germán Gutiérrez and Nicholas Zarra)

• Abstract: This paper studies the interaction between merger policy, market structure and innovation incentives. We develop a model that features competition between dominant and fringe firms with markets for technology. The model yields two testable predictions: (i) Industries with higher firm dominance invest more in incremental innovation. (ii) Laxer merger policy increases incremental innovation. We then test these predictions in the data, using changes in US Merger Review policy in 2001 as an instrument. Consistent with the model, we document a substantial reduction in radical innovation following the policy change in industries more affected by the policy. We find evidence that venture capital firms allocates more capital to start-ups that produced incremental innovation and exited via mergers after the policy change.