I am a PhD Candidate in Economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business, with work in finance and macroeconomics. 

My research interests are in corporate finance, banking, and liquidity management, with a focus on using structural macro-finance models to study individual firm behavior and banks. 

I am on the academic job market in 2025-2026.

CV: link

Contact: cindychung@stanford.edu

References:

Monika Piazzesi (co-primary): piazzesi@stanford.edu

Martin Schneider (co-primary): schneidr@stanford.edu

Juliane Begenau: begenau@stanford.edu

Job Market Paper

Small Firm Credit Card Financing and Interest Rate Conditions

This paper studies how small firms respond to monetary policy and recessions. I use new micro data on small firm credit card use to document the role of cards for financing and liquidity management. In the cross section, credit card balances and limits both increase with firm size. Card slack, the unused portion of the credit card available for liquidity, is therefore higher for larger firms. Over time, card slack often co-moves with aggregate deposits, but declined in the COVID recession when deposits increased. To explain these facts, I develop a quantitative model of constrained firms with liquidity demand. I show that smaller, more constrained firms optimally use credit cards more for borrowing and less for liquidity than larger firms. Monetary policy tightening affects larger firms relatively more by raising their cost of liquidity.

Working Papers

Correspondent Banking in International Trade

This paper studies the impact of pricing distortions by correspondent banks on trade, output, and welfare. By incorporating a correspondent banking sector into a Melitz-style model of trade, this paper interprets trade costs not only as transportation resource costs but also as banking transfers. This framework is then used to analyze the welfare implications of introducing Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) as an additional option for international payments. The paper's findings show that the competitive structure of the banking sector leads to misallocation of labor resources: larger firms produce less while smaller firms produce more than what is produced in the efficient allocation. Introducing CBDC leads to two main welfare effects: larger firms produce more, leading to increased consumption while smaller firms contract and leave the market, resulting in a loss of good varieties available for consumption. Under the current calibration, CBDC is shown to increase welfare by 1.74%, overall benefitting households and increasing aggregate output.

Publications

Data and the Aggregate Economy (with Laura Veldkamp) 

Journal of Economic Literature 2024, 62(2), 458–484

Recent data technology innovations, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, have transformed the production of knowledge and increased the importance of data. This review explores how data—digitized information—has been modeled within classic macroeconomic frameworks. It compares the economics of data to other concepts such as ideas, patents, and learning-by-doing. This paper also shows potential ways to model applications for data, including innovation, process optimization, and matching. Because this research area is nascent, much of the article is devoted to open questions and directions for future data economy research.