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
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
Research
Working papers
1. "Self-Fulfilling Liquidity and Coordination in Intermediated Markets"
Abstract: Firms meet liquidity needs by entering long-term contracts with financial intermediaries that pool idiosyncratic shocks across many firms and discipline each with rewards and sanctions. I study what limits liquidity under general contracts. In a continuous-time economy with hidden effort, limited commitment, and an information lag, the optimal arrangement caps each agent's liquidity at the value of his continuation promise. The economy's capacity to provide liquidity is therefore a fixed point: generous valuations relax the very constraints that make promises credible. With competitive intermediaries whose positions are marked to market at settlement dates, however distant, every solution of this fixed-point problem is an equilibrium: coordination failure resides in the price of promises. An equilibrium with positive investment is inefficient exactly when 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). R&R, 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.