"Bond Hedge Effectiveness", Job Market Paper
Presented at: Birkbeck Business School (2024), UK Women in Finance - Bayes Business School (2026)
Abstract
This paper studies when U.S. Treasury bonds hedge equity risk. I construct novel textual measures using a large corpus of media articles to test whether investor narratives explain time variation in the conditional sensitivity of Treasury bond returns to stock returns. Higher investor pessimism predicts a more negative conditional sensitivity. The effect is stronger when investor pessimism and recent realized stock and bond returns correlation are aligned. I further find that investor attention is associated with more negative stock-bond comovement, whereas media disagreement has limited explanatory power. These results distinguish between strong and weak bond hedge regimes and improve portfolio allocation, although its value depends on the inflation environment.
"The Media Coverage of Female Scholars: Evidence for the Finance, Economics, And Business Disciplines" , with Moqi Groen-Xu and Fabrizio Core
*Winner of the American Finance Association - Academic Female Finance Committee and the Journal of Financial Economics Proposal Grant 2023
Presented at: Nottingham Interdisciplinary Centre for Economic and Political Research 2026 (Nottingham), European Economic Association 2026 (Dublin)
Abstract
We provide systematic evidence on the media coverage of finance, economics and business scholars from research-intensive universities in the United States. First, only 40% of media appearances are about specific research, highlighting the role of academics as experts in the public realm. Second, male scholars are 42% more likely to appear in any media articles, and, among those that receive any coverage, appear in 14% more articles. This gap is most pronounced for financial economists and it can only be partially explained by scarcity of senior women and differences in research productivity. We provide evidence consistent with demand-side explanations: male journalists are less likely to cite female researchers; and female authors are less likely to be named in articles about papers with mixed-gender author teams. In contrast, female researchers are just as likely to be quoted, suggesting that they do not engage in less outreach. We provide a public version of our data on media coverage.
"Advertising and the media coverage of universities" , with Moqi Groen-Xu and Fabrizio Core
Abstract
Media coverage of academic research supports dissemination of research to users and regulators, recruiting potential students, and is associated with more journal citations. We test whether advertising can affect such coverage. We find that media coverage of institutions are correlated with recent advertising by their institution in the venue. The number of articles in a venue on an institution doubles in the quarter after advertising. Our tests control for time-varying institution characteristics as well as institution--venue fixed effects. Our results raise questions about the independence of editorial decisions and potential biases in the coverage of research.
This paper presents ACA-MEDIA, a new dataset on the media coverage of academic researchers in economics, finance, and business based in the United States between 2010 and 2023. The dataset includes venue, date, the researcher covered, and their gender for 26,047 media mentions of 3,952 researchers. These media citations include discussions of research, interviews on current news as well as profiles. We construct the data to facilitate the exploration of the determinants and effects of media coverage of academic research and researchers.