Zepeng Wang
PhD candidate of Swiss Finance Institute at University of Lausanne
Email: zepeng.wang@unil.ch
Office: UNIL-Extranef, Floor 2
Phone: +41(0)768308985
I am keen to understand precisely how firms operate in a complex economic landscape and generate returns for investors, and I view networks as an essential framework for comprehending an economy of interconnected entities, the firms.
My current work focuses on developing statistical learning solutions to tackle the challenges in the analysis of complex economic networks, for the fields of empirical asset pricing and corporate finance. I also study the economic mechanisms driving firm strategic interactions in network.
I am on the 2023/2024 academic job market.
Research
Heterogeneous Network-based Empirical Asset Pricing
JMP, solo-authored
The stock return function of a firm operating in a production network should be considered as a function of not just its own characteristics but also those of its network neighbors, which hold economic significance.
Conditioning on the production network neighborhood context can be as effective as conditioning on the broader macroeconomic climate via macro variables.
Paper2_NetworkAssetPricing.pdfBeyond Peers: Cross-Industry Competition and Strategic Financing
co-authored with Boris Nikolov and Norman Schürhoff
An example of 2018Q1 competition network of the US economy, is ploted below in three panels. Firms are indicated by nodes. Every pair of nodes linked by one direct edge is a pair of direct competitors.
From left to right panels, the colors of nodes and edges indicate the classifications of SIC1 Industries, SIC2 Industries, and a cross-industry Competition Communities detected by an algorithm in our work.
Paper1_LeverageML.pdf
