Zijun Wang
I am a PhD candidate in Finance at HEC Paris.
I am on the 2026–27 academic job market.
My research studies economic interactions through the lens of contracts and incentive.
You can find my CV here.
Email: zijun.wang@hec.edu
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Research
Working papers
1. "Insurance, Incentives, and Self-Fulfilling Liquidity" (Job Market Paper)
Abstract: I study liquidity provision in a continuous-time production economy. A continuum of risk-neutral agents privately observes two idiosyncratic shocks: liquidity shocks and quality shocks. Quality shocks render capital obsolete, and hidden effort lowers their intensity. Funds released to meet liquidity needs tempt agents who have lost their capital to falsely claim a liquidity shock. The constrained-efficient allocation is implemented by credit lines and insurance on capital. Insurance encourages truthful reporting of capital losses and supports larger credit lines. Inducing effort, however, requires agents to keep enough skin in the game. Insurance and liquidity reinforce each other through equilibrium asset values: higher values allow more insurance while preserving effort incentives, and more insurance supports larger credit lines, which make capital more valuable. More severe moral hazard makes the effort-compatible level of insurance more sensitive to asset values. In the decentralized economy with competitive intermediaries, the equilibrium is unique and constrained efficient when moral hazard is mild; when it is sufficiently severe, inferior equilibria with self-fulfilling liquidity shortages coexist with the efficient one. On balanced growth paths with profitable investment, an equilibrium is inefficient if and only if the risk-free rate lies below the growth rate of capital. In an illustrative calibration, the equilibrium matching the targeted moments is inefficient.
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. "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.
Publication
1. "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.
Teaching
TA for Microeconomics (Master), HEC Paris and Polytechnique 2022, 2023, 2024.
TA for Financial Markets (Master), HEC Paris 2022.
TA for ECO101: Introduction to Economics (undergraduate), Ecole Polytechnique 2021.
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