Zijun Wang
I am a PhD student at HEC Paris and will be on the 2026–27 academic job market.
My research focuses on corporate finance theory and macro-finance.
You can find my CV here.
Email: zijun.wang@hec.edu
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Research
Working papers
1. "Self-Fulfilling Liquidity in Intermediated Markets"
Abstract: This paper studies the limits of committed liquidity under long-term contracts in a production economy. Effort is hidden and reduces the likelihood of adverse shocks, so inducing it requires a loss of continuation value after a shock. Before the shock is verified, the agent can falsely report a liquidity need, draw on the commitment, and exit. Deterring this deviation endogenously caps committed liquidity. Because the cap depends on the continuation value that liquid storage and illiquid capital support, the constrained-efficient frontier is characterized by the greatest fixed point of their joint valuation system, in which the two asset values reinforce each other. When competitive intermediaries have finite but arbitrarily long careers, constant-price equilibria correspond exactly to the system's nonnegative fixed points, including inferior ones. On a balanced growth path with investment, an equilibrium is inefficient if and only if growth exceeds the risk-free rate.
2. "A Model of Managerial Short-Termism".
Abstract: I study a dynamic contracting model that explains managerial short-termism in equilibrium. I extend the canonical cash-flow diversion framework by allowing the agent to inefficiently boost instantaneous cash flow at the cost of lower expected capital stock growth ("short-termism"). Deterring cash-flow diversion requires high sensitivity of the agent's payoff to instantaneous cash flow, which in turn tempts the agent to engage in short-termism. The sensitivity of the agent's payoff to capital stock growth plays a dual role, deterring short-termism and governing risk sharing, whose cost arises endogenously. In the optimal contract, short-termism is tolerated after poor performance, when the tension between incentive provision and risk sharing is most severe. I also explore implications for compensation design, default rates, and growth.
3. "Does the winner-take-all rule favor minorities?" (with Yukio Koriyama). Forthcoming, Social Choice and Welfare.
Abstract: We consider a two-stage probabilistic model of weighted voting and provide a necessary and sufficient condition under which any symmetric rule is more likely to favor the minority than the proportional rule. We show that the most critical factor is the ratio of the expected variance of the group margin to the variance of the expected group margin. The mathematical condition is interpreted, using concepts such as noisiness, wasted votes and statistical gerrymandering. A series of examples illustrate that the winner-take-all rule is likely to favor the minority under fairly general conditions, while there is one class of preference distributions with which the winner-take-all rule is less likely to favor the minority: a polarized society. The model is extended to endogenous voting, in which we show that minority favoring of the winner-take-all rule is reinforced by the underdog effect. Our numerical computation verifies the sensibility of the asymptotic analysis.
4. "Stablecoin Issuers' Financial Policies" (with Romain Rossello).
Abstract: This paper studies the financial policy of stablecoin issuers: how they are funded and how they distribute reserves. We document that issuers with similar business activities may adopt similar policies (MakerDAO and Aave) or very different ones (Tether and Circle). We rationalize this pattern with a model in which the return earned on reserves is a fundamental characteristic that differs between on-chain and off-chain issuers. The higher return available to off-chain issuers exacerbates agency frictions and, in turn, shapes optimal financial policy. We show that the resulting effect is non-monotone in observable outcomes: a higher return can lead to concentrated insider ownership and flexible, aggressive payouts, but it can also lead to dispersed equity ownership and rigid, conservative policies. We close with novel evidence that the implementation of on-chain buyback programs is subject to important frictions.
Teaching
TA for Microeconomics (Master), HEC Paris and Polytechnique 2022, 2023, 2024.
TA for Financial Markets (Master), HEC Paris 2022.
TA for Microeconomics (undergraduate), Ecole Polytechnique 2021.
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