Qiping Xu 

Assistant Professor of Finance 

Gies College of Business

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Email: qipingxu@illinois.edu 

[Download CV]

Publications:

Sustainability or Greenwashing: Evidence from the Asset Market for Industrial Pollution,  Journal of Finance (forthcoming)

(with Ran Duchin, Janet Gao)

Media: The Fin Reg Blog (Duke University School of Law), Promarket (University of Chicago Stilger Center)


Tax Policy and Abnormal Investment Behavior, Review of Financial Studies (2024)

       (with Eric Zwick)


Personal Taxes and Labor Downskilling: Evidence from 27 Million Job Postings,  Management Science (2023)

       (with Murillo Campello, Janet Gao)

Financial Costs of Judicial Inexperience, JFQA (2022)

       (with Benjamin Iverson, Joshua Madsen, Wei Wang)

 Media:  Wall Street Journal,  Oxford Business Law Blog    Harvard Law School Bankruptcy Roundtable

Financial Constraints and Corporate Environmental Policies, Review of Financial Studies (2021)

       (with Taehyun Kim)

       Media:  Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI)

Caught in the Cross-fire: How the Threat of Hedge Fund Activism Affects Creditors, Journal of Empirical Finance, 2021

        (with Felix Feng, Heqing Zhu)

       Media: Columbia Law School Blog

Kicking Maturity Down the Road: Early Refinancing and Maturity Management in the Corporate Bond Market, Review of Financial Studies (2018)

Working Papers:

CEO Hometown Preference in Corporate Environmental Policies, Accepted, Management Science

         (with Wei Li, Qifei Zhu) 

We exploit within-firm variations in plant-level toxic releases to examine the effect of managerial hometown preference on corporate environmental policies. We find that pollution levels are about 30% lower for plants located near CEOs' hometowns. This reduction is achieved through resource-intensive pollution control efforts, including source reduction and waste management activities. Analyses using CEO turnover provide causal inferences. Local residents benefit from CEO hometown pollution reduction, as localities hosting more hometown plants experience improved environmental conditions and better residential health outcomes. On the other hand, some evidence suggests CEOs' hometown preference is related to agency frictions. Overall, our findings reveal the impact of CEOs' personal motivations on corporate pollution dynamics and their consequential effects on the well-being of local communities.


Temperature, Adaption, and Local Industry Concentration 

        (with Jacopo Ponticelli, Stefan Zeume)

We use plant-level data from the U.S. Census of Manufacturers to study the short- and long-run effects of temperature on manufacturing activity.  We find that high-temperature shocks significantly increase energy costs and lower productivity for small plants, while large plants are mostly unaffected. Commuting zones with higher increases in average temperatures between the 1980s and the 2010s experience a decline in the number of small plants, reallocation of labor from small to large plants, and higher local labor market concentration. Differences in costs per unit of energy, managerial skills, and access to finance contribute to explaining our results.

Media: VOX, Kellogg Insight

Access to Financing and Racial Pay Gap inside Firms

  (with Janet Gao, Wenting Ma)

How does access to financing influence racial pay inequality inside firms? We answer this question using the employer-employee matched data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau and exploiting the staggered passage of anti-recharacterization laws as a shock to firms’ debt capacity. We find that better access to debt financing significantly narrows the earning gap between minority and white workers. Minority workers experience a persistent increase in earnings and also a rise in the pay rank relative to white workers in the same firm. This effect is not explained by intrinsic differences across workers, time-varying skill premium inside the firm, labor market competition, or dynamic worker-firm matching. The effect is more pronounced among mid- and high-skill workers, in areas where white workers are in shorter supply, and for firms with less diverse boards and greater pre-existing racial inequality. Our evidence is consistent with access to financing allowing firms to better utilize minority workers’ human capital.