Research

• We find CTC recipients significantly increase their consumption following the payment and  lower-income recipients experience a significant reduction in liquidity constraints 

• We observe a greater alleviation of liquidity constraints from monthly CTC payments compared to annual tax refunds, informing considerations for payment frequency

• We provide insights into the income thresholds for the policy's phase-in and phase-out by demonstrating the most pronounced consumption effects among the lowest-income recipients and noting an absence of significant consumption changes among higher-income recipients

We provide the first comprehensive examination of the properties and informativeness of bank ratings, relative to CRA ratings. 

• Banks often rate firms not covered by CRAs

• Bank ratings deviate from CRA ratings for about 60% of the cases 

• Bank ratings contain incremental information to predict CRA rating revisions and future defaults, and explain the cross-section of credit spreads

• Bank ratings do not improve out-of-sample prediction of credit excess returns, indicating that current prices incorporate bank rating information

Using banking data for 10.6 million U.S. consumers, we find that BNPL users experience a rapid deterioration in financial health (e.g., increases in overdraft charges). An instrumental variable exploiting consumers’ pre-BNPL shopping habits increases the credibility of BNPL having a causal negative effect. 

Exploiting the sudden shutdown of Yahoo! Finance API, we examine how access to tech-enabled raw financial data affects retail investment. We find that retail trading in stocks favored by active retail investors falls and the quality of the remaining trades improves. 

Earnings of firms reporting intangibles-driven losses are as informative as earnings of profitable firms after adjusting for the accounting bias of intangibles-expensing. These firms  subsequently outperform other loss firms and even profitable firms in value creation from investments in technological innovation and human capital. 

Exploiting the pre-grant patent disclosure provision of American Inventor’s Protection Act (AIPA), we compare U.S. patents to a counterfactual sample of  European equivalent patents (of U.S. patents) which were not affected by AIPA  and find early patent disclosure promotes knowledge diffusion and clearer property rights while reducing R&D duplication. 

Leveraging the staggered timing of first-time reviews on Glassdoor, we find that firms improve their workplace practices after being reviewed on Glassdoor. Consistent with firms improving their workplace practices to remain competitive on the labor market, such improvement concentrates in firms with negative initial reviews and with high labor intensity.

• Leveraging micro-level data on individual employees’ bank and credit card transactions, we examine the impact of earnings announcement (EA) news on employee spending.  

• We find that EA news elicits significant reactions in employee spending, highlighting the role of financial reporting in employees’ spending decisions.

I use the web traffic to public companies' Wikipedia pages to capture investors' acquisition of contextual information. 

I find that contextual information acquisition peaks at informational events such as earnings announcements and enables investors to better interpret the new events as reflected by higher ERC and faster price discovery.

Exploiting the staggered timing of de facto phase-in of pre-grant patent disclosures of AIPA, we find early patent disclosures enhance price discovery  of patenting firms.

Presented at NYU brownbag seminar, Trans-Atlantic Doctoral Conference, and Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance Annual Conference