Jonas Happel
Ph.D. Candidate in Finance
Frankfurt School of Finance & Management
Jonas Happel
Ph.D. Candidate in Finance
Frankfurt School of Finance & Management
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Ph.D. Candidate in Finance
Frankfurt School of Finance & Management
I'm a Ph.D. candidate in Finance at the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management.
My research focuses on law and finance, household finance, and corporate finance.
Job Market Paper
Job Market Paper
Hidden Interests: Judges' Stock Holdings and Corporate Litigation Outcomes
Abstract: U.S. federal judges are legally prohibited from handling cases in which they knowingly have a financial interest. Using a comprehensive dataset of judge financial disclosures, I investigate the impact of stock-based conflicts of interest on case outcomes in more than 70,000 U.S. civil cases against publicly listed companies from 2011 to 2019. Exploiting quasi-random judge assignments, I find that plaintiff success rates decrease by 16% when judges hold direct stock in the defendant firm. The effect is concentrated among an often overlooked group of temporarily employed judges, whose decisions appear influenced by non-financial considerations towards individual firms, rather than direct monetary incentives. An analysis of case assignment patterns reveals that existing judicial processes fail to prevent direct stock conflicts in approximately 30% of relevant cases. These findings highlight the need to expand conflict-of-interest regulations, along with increased oversight of temporarily employed judges.
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Publications
Publications
Shattered Housing (with Yigitcan Karabulut, Larissa Schäfer, and Şelale Tüzel)
Journal of Financial Economics, 2024, 156 (Editor's Choice)
Abstract: Do negative housing shocks lead to persistent changes in household attitudes toward housing and homeownership? We use the residential destruction of Germany during World War II (WWII) as a quasi-experiment and exploit the reasonably exogenous region-by-cohort variation in destruction exposure. We find that WWII-experiencing cohorts from high destruction regions are significantly less likely to be homeowners decades later, controlling for regional differences and household characteristics. Underlying this effect are changes in household attitudes toward homeownership that also extend to preferences for housing consumption, with little or no support for risk preferences, income and wealth effects, or supply-side factors.
Link to Paper (ScieneDirect) | Link to Paper (SSRN)
WORK IN PROGRESS
WORK IN PROGRESS
Political Alignment in the Courtroom (with Larissa Schäfer and Elisabeth Kempf)
Institutional Trading and Corporate Litigation (with Yigitcan Karabulut and Egemen Genc)
Teaching
Teaching
Frankfurt School of Finance & Management
Full Courses:
Corporate Finance, B.Sc., 2022
Classes:
Corporate Finance (Case Study), B.Sc., 2023
Teaching Assistance:
Money & Banking, B.Sc., 2024 - 2025e
Corporate Finance, B.Sc., 2021 - 2023
Foundations of Finance, B.Sc., 2020
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