Junior Academics Research Seminars (JARS) in Finance

Qiang Wang is a fifth-year Ph.D. student at the Smeal College of Business, Pennsylvania State University. Her dissertation studies a blockchain-based lending market, while her broader research agenda touches on a wide range of topics in areas such as cryptocurrency assets, blockchain technology, and student loans. Qiang’s work has been presented at several major conferences, including INFORMS, the Boulder Summer Conference on Consumer Financial Decision Making, and the Western Finance Association. Before joining Penn State, Qiang completed her M.S. in Business Analytics from George Washington University and her B.A. in Food Science from Zhejiang University.

Jiaqi Zheng is a PhD candidate in Finance at the University of Oxford, supervised by Professors Renée Adams and Thomas Noe. His research focuses on how corporate governance shapes firm behaviour. In his job market paper, he examines the interaction between public policy and private-sector prosocial behaviors in the context of greenhouse gas emissions. He finds that public policies may crowd out corporate social responsibility efforts, thereby offsetting the intended effects of such policies. Jiaqi’s other research explores the role of CEO power during uncertain times and how the corporate calendar influences the timing of both share repurchases and CEO compensation.

Matilde Faralli is a PhD candidate in Finance at Imperial College London. Her research interests include climate finance, corporate finance, behavioral finance, and sovereign defaults. Her current work provides evidence of how agents update their beliefs about climate risks after experiencing weather events, with a focus on equity analysts. Other projects examine how climate risks impact companies' financial risks. Matilde holds an MA in Economics and a BA in Business and Economics from the University of Bologna.

Linda Du is an Instructor of Finance at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. Her primary research focuses on investments, including mutual funds and ETFs. Her recent work studies the market microstructure of how fixed-income ETFs are able to provide liquidity and recent developments in the active investment space of ETFs. She is completing her Ph.D. in Finance at the McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin and holds a B.S. in Operations Research - Financial Engineering from Columbia University.

Tianchen (Hugo) Zhao is a 4th year Ph.D. student in Finance at the Smith School of Business, University of Maryland. Hugo’s research interests include empirical asset pricing, municipal finance, and sustainable finance. His recent papers explore the impact of data breaches on local governments’ borrowing costs and finances, as well as the underlying drivers of the returns to CSR investing. Before his doctoral studies, Hugo obtained an M.A. degree in Economics from Columbia University and a B.A. degree in Economics and Mathematics from Emory University.

Harshini Shanker is a PhD candidate in finance at the London Business School with research interests in equilibrium models, market microstructure and applied game theory. Recent research includes modelling non-economic preferences in asset pricing, strategic investor interactions within equilibrium models and empirical implications of multi-tiered capital structures in firms.