Sovereign Wealth Funds in the Post-Pandemic Era with William L. Megginson, and Asif I. Malik
Journal of International Business Policy, 2023
Nonlinear Structural Estimation of Corporate Bond Liquidity with Diego Leal, Bryan Stanhouse, and Duane Stock
Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, 2024
The Case Against a US Sovereign Wealth Fund with William L. Megginson and Robert Gholson
The Financial Review, 2025
Stock Tribes: Social Identity in Online Stock Communities (JMP, solo-authored)
Core findings: I fine-tune a machine learning model to create a novel measure capturing social media users' exposure to tribalistic content. Leveraging exogenous site outages, I find high exposure to tribalistic content causes more buying and amplifies the disposition effect, where investors are more likely to hold onto losing positions.
2025 FMA Best Paper Semi-finalist award
Presentations: SouthernFA 2025 (scheduled), ACM 2nd Workshop on LLMs and Generative AI for Finance (scheduled), FMA 2025, 18th International Behavioural Finance Conference, EFMA 2025, Finance and Accounting 2025 Annual Research Symposium, 13 SIIFC International Conference & 9th Shanghai-Edinburgh-London Conference Sustainable Finance in the Digital Era, Research Symposium on Finance and Economics (RSFE) 2025, 2nd Knut Wicksell Conference on Crypto and Fintech, 21st Annual Conference of the Asia-Pacific Association of Derivatives (APAD 2025), 18th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Behavioral Finance & EconomicsÂ
Tribalistic narratives spread through investor communities and affect trading behavior. Using data from a Bitcoin focused forum and linked Bitcoin transactions, I construct measures of exposure to tribalistic content. I exploit exogenous platform outages that disrupted social interaction but not trading. Difference-in-differences analyses show that investors with high prior tribalistic exposure are less likely to buy Bitcoin during outages, and the contagion of tribalistic language declines. Tribalistic exposure amplifies the disposition effect where investors are more likely to hold onto losing positions. Social network analyses show that tribalistic identity fosters echo chambers.
Clauses with Claws: Reducing Agency Costs in Late-Merging SPACs (with Diego Leal, Fang Lin, Asif I. Malik, Peter C. Mueller, and Bryan E. Stanhouse; Under Review)
Core findings: Contingency clauses in SPAC IPO prospectuses are effective in reducing agency costs for late-merging SPACs. Late merging SPACs without such clauses experience 7-9% lower merger announcement returns and 30% lower deSPAC ROA.
Presentations: 5th Annual Boca-ECGI Corporate Finance and Governance Conference 2024*, SouthernFA (2024)*, FMA (2024), 2024 Lone Star Finance Conference at University of Texas El Paso*, 2024 International Corporate Governance Society at Arizona State University (ICGS), Southwestern Finance Association Conference* (SWFA), 2024 World Finance Conference (WFC), 2024 World Finance and Banking Symposium (WFBS)*, University of Oklahoma, Fordham University
*Presented by co-author
We investigate the timing of SPAC mergers and subsequent deSPAC performance. Inspired by a simple target acquisition model, we employ duration analysis and find that SPACs often merge late, which is suggestive of high agency costs near the SPAC liquidation deadline. Contingency clauses can mitigate these costs by aligning manager and shareholder interests. Late merging SPACs without such clauses underperform, with 7-9% lower merger announcement returns and 30% lower deSPAC ROA. Notably, SPAC contingency clauses are only performative when agency costs are high, underscoring their importance in improving the performance of late-merging deSPACs.
The Impact of Salient News on the Intertemporal Behavior of Asset Prices (Solo-authored)
Core findings: My model characterizes the information environment to produce a risky asset price bubble: (i) a series of information shocks that include a positive error term and (ii) the economy is populated by investors who react strongly to non-fundamental news.
Presentation: University of Oklahoma
I model the intertemporal behavior of a risky asset's price when the traders in the economy have limited attention and thus react differently to information signals with different salience levels. My model provides a clear connection between different information environments and the risky asset's corresponding price path. Both the prominence of the news, good or bad, and how much investors react or value such news directly determine the intertemporal behavior of risky asset prices. Furthermore, my model describes the necessary information environment to produce a risky asset price bubble. My model demonstrates that only two conditions are needed to create a price bubble: (i) a series of information shocks that include a positive error term and (ii) the economy is populated by investors who react strongly to non-fundamental news.
When Beliefs Drive Hiring: Distorted Expectations and AI Labor with Jared Stanfield and Violet Xu
Political Censorship and Retail Investing solo-authored