Working Papers

Burnout to Buildout: Brown Asset Exit and Green Transition Misallocation
  • Does exiting polluting assets necessarily deliver a green transition? I trace firm-level generation portfolios after a coal exit shock
  • Fossil substitution vs. green transition: mandates and incentives expand renewable investment, but can carry geographic costs
  • Counterfactuals from a firm decision model: aligning policy with resource geography delivers more output with fewer projects
Presentations: Durham (2026), CICF (2026; scheduled)
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Banking on Forest
with Xian Gu (Durham), Felix Irresberger (Durham), Yun Zhu (St. John’s)
  • Credit markets distinguish between physical forest shocks and regulation-driven transition risk
  • Fire-induced loss is priced throughout; human-induced loss only after EUDR, especially for EU operators
  • Loan access supports green transition through responsible sourcing, reforestation, and plant divestiture
Presentations: Durham (2025), CICF (2025), GRASFI PhD Workshop (2025 Edinburgh), FMA (2025), FMA Europe (2025), Conference on Contemporary Issues in Banking (2025 St Andrews), Cardiff-Leeds Sustainable Finance Conference (2026 Leeds; scheduled), etc.
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Trading Under Scrutiny: Social Media Attention and Congressional Trading
with Xian Gu (Durham), Yiming Qian (UConn)
  • Comprehensive dataset of congressional trades constructed through structured scraping, OCR, LLMs, and manual collection
  • Individual-targeted Twitter discussions reduce trading volume and returns, especially for influential politicians and before elections
  • Findings suggest social media acts as a disciplining force that complements the STOCK Act of 2012
Presentations: CICF (2026; scheduled)
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Biodiversity Risk and Bank Lending
with Xian Gu (Durham), Felix Irresberger (Durham)
  • Assessing firm-level biodiversity risk (ecosystem dependency & business condition) using call transcripts
  • Both loan spreads and non-price terms are unaffected by firms’ biodiversity risk or banks’ commitments
  • Findings suggest limited impact of banks’ voluntary pledges across 44 risk proxies and multiple specifications
Presentations: Boca-ECGI Corporate Finance (2024), etc.
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Political Network and Muted Insider Trading
Revise and resubmit, Journal of Corporate Finance
with Xian Gu (Durham), Iftekhar Hasan (Fordham), Yun Zhu (St. John’s)
  • Chairman–politician network built from biographical data, capturing the strength, rank, and duration of ties
  • Political networks as informal governance in China: connected firms engage in less insider trading
  • Stronger effects in non-SOEs and around M&A and major policy events, when private information is especially valuable
Presentations: FMA (2024), MFA (2023), FMA Europe (2023), etc.
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