I am an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Ivy College of Business, Iowa State University. I earned my Ph.D. in Finance from the University of Utah in 2021. I am a member of the Finance Theory Group. I was a CERF Research Associate at Cambridge Judge Business School and a Bye-Fellow at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge.
My research uses both theory and empirical methods to study corporate governance. I work on corporate democracy, hedge fund activism, ESG, and disclosure.
Voting and Trading: The Shareholder’s Dilemma, with Adam Meirowitz [Theoretical]
--Journal of Financial Economics, Volume 146, Issue 3, December 2022.
Shareholders who can both vote and trade have incentives to vote against their private information in order to profit from the resulting market distortion, lowering the quality of corporate governance.
Betting on My Enemy: Insider Trading Ahead of Hedge Fund 13D Filings, with Truong Duong and Travis R. A. Sapp [Empirical]
--Journal of Corporate Finance, Volume 93, July 2025, 102794
Corporate insiders earn abnormal returns by buying their firm's stock ahead of hedge fund 13D filings, suggesting they have private knowledge that the firm is being targeted by activists.
Voting for Socially Responsible Corporate Policies, with Adam Meirowitz and Matthew Ringgenberg [Theoretical]
--Conditionally Accepted by Critical Finance Review
Shareholder voting can stably aggregate preferences when there is one social objective alongside firm value, but produces policy indeterminacy and volatility when voters care about multiple social objectives at once.
--Revise & Resubmit to Review of Corporate Finance Studies
Activist hedge funds face a trade-off when building coalitions: collaborating with fellow active shareholders spreads activism costs but jeopardizes support from the passive shareholders whose votes they ultimately need.
Shareholder Attentiveness, Corporate Democracy, and Market Liquidity, with Adam Meirowitz [Theoretical]
Having more informed investors does not reliably improve governance — and can actively hurt it, unless the market liquidity is low.
Strategic Voting and Informational Rents: Evidence from Mutual Funds’ Trades and Votes, with Meng Gao and Jiekun Huang [Empirical]
Using mutual funds' voting and trading records, we find evidence that informed funds sometimes vote against their private information to preserve its value for trading — a friction in shareholder democracy where trading profits weaken governance.
Delegated Shareholder Activism, with Daniel Bernhardt [Theoretical]
A hedge fund activist can win more votes by delegating its analysis to another activist.
Greenwashing or Pragmatism? with Junxi Liu and Ao Wang [Structural]
An anatomy of shareholder democracy on ES issues, using an industrial organization (IO) approach.
Disclosure and Shareholder Voting, with Hui Chen [Theoretical]
More informative accounting disclosures first crowd in and then crowd out shareholders' acquisition of private information, yet both crowd-in and crowd-out are efficient.
Public Information as a Source of Disagreement Among Shareholders, with Laurent Bouton, Aniol Llorente-Saguer, Antonin Macé, Adam Meirowitz, and Dimitrios Xefteris [Theoretical]
Disagreement among investors after public announcements can arise even with fully homogeneous preferences and beliefs, as long as information shapes firm decisions rather than just firm value.