"Shareholder Demand for Disclosure and Firm Resistance: Evidence from 30 Years of Proposals" Solo-authored
Shareholders increasingly ask firms to disclose rather than to act. Assembling and analyzing three decades of shareholder proposals with large language models (LLMs), I provide an anatomy of who demands disclosure, what information they request, on what grounds, and how firms resist supplying it. Institutional proponents turn to disclosure more often than individuals. The requested content spans a spectrum of managerial discretion, from factual descriptions to forward-looking and analytical assessments. Proponents appeal to reductions in external and internal information asymmetry and to positive real effects. Firms counter with compliance costs, proprietary risks, distortions to their operations, and denials of incremental value. Consistent with the existence of processing costs, firms argue that the requested information is already public—most often on their websites—in 31% of disclosure proposals. These arguments are associated with the SEC’s concurrence in exclusion and the shareholder vote. Finally, proponents choose disclosure rather than action when an issue’s importance is established but the firm-specific solution is contested.
"How Shareholders Argue: Three Decades of Proposal Narratives" Solo-authored
Shareholder proposals are a key governance channel, yet their legitimacy is under review at the SEC. To evaluate this channel, I build the first full-text corpus of shareholder proposals from DEF 14A filings (1994–2025) and SEC no-action letters (2008–2025). I use large language models to decompose each proposal’s argumentative structure into causal chains and document four stylized facts. First, narratives are not boilerplate and predict both SEC no-action decisions and shareholder vote support out of sample. Second, proposals have polarized between shareholder-oriented and stakeholder-oriented proponents since 2016, and board responses diverge along the same axis. Third, across decades, proponents increasingly target stakeholder problems and ground their arguments in external evidence, while boards more frequently deflect problems and dismiss remedies as redundant. Fourth, almost half of stakeholder-problem proposals are argued in shareholder-value terms, while the reverse is rare. This asymmetry grows over time and is not an artifact of SEC screening or anti-ESG backlash. Exploiting cross-firm variation in the severity of prior ESG incidents, together with the June 2017 formation of the US Climate Alliance as a natural experiment, I provide evidence that this asymmetry reflects the internalization of externalities.
"The Geoeconomics of Imports: Evidence from the UN Security Council Elections" with Jing Wu
We study whether U.S. market access serves as an instrument of geopolitical statecraft. Exploiting UN Security Council elections, we show that U.S. firms increase imports from newly elected members by 5.5 percent ($340 million per two-year term). The increase is concentrated in products where elected countries lack comparative advantage---inconsistent with efficiency-driven sourcing---and is largest for ideological ``swing" countries and members with greater agenda-setting power. Tariff relief, federal procurement, and lobbying by politically connected firms reveal two channels: policy concessions and private rent-seeking. Countries receiving larger import increases subsequently align more closely with the United States in votes and official statements.
"LIFO and the Muted Response to Inflation Expectations" with Hanwen Xu and Heng Yue
Firms tend to increase inventory when they expect input prices to rise, buying ahead to lock in lower costs. We first provide evidence that the stockpiling channel, rather than a lower real cost of capital, is the primary driver of the positive relation between inventory and inflation expectations. We then find that the Last-In, First-Out (LIFO) inventory method significantly dampens this response, consistent with LIFO muting the short-term earnings benefit of buying ahead and potentially weakening managers' incentive to stockpile. This attenuation is stronger among firms with larger LIFO reserves, consistent with LIFO liquidation substituting for proactive stockpiling. Using Section 301 tariffs and physical import quantities from Bills of Lading, we provide corroborating evidence that these patterns reflect real behavioral differences rather than mechanical valuation effects.
"Monetary Policy and Trade Credit" with Weikai Li and Jing Wu
Trade credit — roughly three times the size of bank loans — is a critical yet underexplored channel of monetary policy transmission. We study this channel using a novel dataset from Dun & Bradstreet's Global Trade Exchange, which provides monthly firm-level payment records disaggregated by payment timeliness. We find that contractionary monetary policy surprises significantly increase trade credit, driven predominantly by customers delaying payments beyond contractual terms, particularly in long-overdue accounts, and to a lesser extent by expanded within-term provisions. Cross-sectionally, trade credit responses are stronger among firms with higher growth options, tighter financial constraints, and better information environments, consistent with trade credit serving as substitute financing when bank credit tightens. We further show that the ex ante level and structure of trade credit explain cross-sectional variation in stock price reactions to monetary policy announcements. Our findings establish supply-chain credit as a significant margin of adjustment through which firms absorb monetary policy shocks.
A project on Chinese land market
A project on political economy of entrepreneurship
A project on data center and neighbourhood welfare