Research

PUBLICATIONS

• Get the Money Somehow: The Effect of Missing Performance Goals on Insider Trading, 2026, solo-authored, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, forthcoming. SSRN Link

• Informed Voting, 2025, with Jiekun Huang, Review of Financial Studies 38, 1167–1210. SSRN Link

• Informing the Market: The Effect of Modern Information Technologies on Information Production, 2020, with Jiekun Huang, Review of Financial Studies 33, 1367–1411 [Editor’s Choice, lead article]. SSRN Link

• Capitalizing on Capitol Hill: Informed Trading by Hedge Fund Managers, 2016, with Jiekun Huang, Journal of Financial Economics 121, 521–545. SSRN Link

WORKING PAPERS

• Carbon, Climate, and Congress: How Campaign Contributions Shape Climate Roll Call Votes, with Jiekun Huang, working paper, 2026. SSRN Link

We propose a measure of carbon dependency to capture the concentration of high-emission firms within a politician's donor base. We show that lawmakers with high carbon dependency are more likely to cast pro-carbon votes on climate legislation. To establish causality, we exploit the narrow defeat of incumbent representatives as a plausibly exogenous shock to their peers' carbon dependency.

• Woke or Broke? The Impact of Corporate Activism on Product Sales, with Xiang Zheng, working paper, 2026. SSRN Link

We examine consumer reactions to corporate activism and find that while households increase spending on ideologically aligned firms, they reduce spending on misaligned firms. We show that these divergent responses offset each other to create a net-neutral impact on aggregate sales, suggesting that activism is primarily driven by executive political ideology rather than economic incentives.

• Strategic Voting and Informational Rents: Evidence from Mutual Funds’ Trades and Votes, with Jiekun Huang and Shaoting Pi, working paper, 2026. SSRN Link 

We examine whether informed mutual funds vote strategically against their private information to preserve its value for trading.  We show that post-vote net buying by these strategic voters positively predicts subsequent abnormal stock returns following contentious votes, suggesting that the pursuit of trading profits can weaken the effectiveness of proxy voting as an information aggregation mechanism. 

• Stigmatized Borrowers: Identity-Based Markups in Mortgage Pricing, with Jiekun Huang, working paper, 2026. SSRN Link 

We examine whether pandemic-induced anti-Asian animus generated non-fundamental pricing disparities in the U.S. mortgage market. We show that Chinese borrowers faced a substantial, identity-based markup in mortgage rate spreads that was amplified by lender market power and discretion.