Wendi Du

Assistant Professor of Finance

Darla Moore School of Business

University of South Carolina

wendi.du@sc.edu

Curriculum Vitae

SSRN | Google Scholar

Research Interest: FinTech, Innovation, AI in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Responsible and Sustainable Finance

Job Market Paper

Unlocking the Collateral Value of Trademarks: The Role of Asset Redeployability

Trademarks, the legal protection of brands, are increasingly pledged as collateral in practice. This paper investigates the redeployability channel of trademarks' collateral value. Using a novel court decision that exogenously weakens trademark redeployability, I find a 3.4 percentage point reduction in affected firms’ book leverage, equivalent to a 16.9% decrease in their average book leverage. By using firm-level trademark portfolio data and employing natural language processing (NLP) techniques, including ChatGPT, I show that firms with more licensed trademarks (i.e., those more exposed to the court ruling), experience a stronger negative impact. Additionally, affected firms are less likely to pledge their registered trademarks as collateral afterward. When they do pledge, they pledge a greater number of trademarks, as well as more valuable ones. Affected firms also register fewer new trademarks in the future. In sum, my results highlight the value of trademark collateral in enhancing firms' debt capacity through its redeployability channel.

Presented at: FMA 2024, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of South Carolina, Babson College, Virginia Tech, University of Alberta, UC Riverside

Working Papers

Firm-Level Input Price Changes and Their Effects: A Deep Learning Approach (with Sudheer Chava, Indrajit Mitra, Agam Shah, and Linghang Zeng)

Best Paper Award on FinTech at FMA 2022
Generative AI in Finance 2024
Conference on Emerging Technologies in Accounting and Financial Economics 2023
American Finance Association 2023
Midwest Finance Association 2023
Conference on Financial Economics and Accounting 2022
SITE Conference on New Frontiers in Asset Pricing 2022
Swedish House of Finance Conference on Machine Learning and AI in Finance 2022
China International Conference in Finance 2022

How Informative are Corporate Disclosures on Emerging Technologies? A Language Embedding Approach (with Sudheer Chava and Nikhil Paradkar)

Midwest Finance Association 2022
China International Conference in Finance 2021

Do Managers Walk the Talk on Environmental and Social Issues? (with Sudheer Chava and Baridhi Malakar)

China International Conference in Finance 2022
OCC Symposium on Climate Risk in Banking & Finance 2022

Publications

When FLUE Meets FLANG: Benchmarks and Large Pre-trained Language Model for Financial Domain (with Raj Sanjay Shah, Kunal Chawla, Dheeraj Eidnani, Agam Shah, Sudheer Chava, Natraj Raman, Smiley Charese, Jiaao Chen, Diyi Yang)

Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2022
One of the Top NLP conferences in Computer Science