Xinran Zhang and Huancheng Du, two young teachers from the School of Finance, CUFE, saw three of their co-authored papers published in or accepted by Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, and Journal of Financial Economics world’s three top-class journals on finance.
Tracking Retail Investor Activity, a paper co-authored by the School of Finance’s Assistant Prof. Xinran Zhang, Prof. Ekkehart Boehmer from Singapore Management University, Prof. Charles M. Jones from Columbia University, and Prof. Xiaoyan Zhang from Tsinghua University, was officially published in Journal of Finance, a world-class academic journal on finance. This paper investigates the behaviors of retail investors, puts forward a new algorithm that can identify retail investors from transaction data, finds that retail investors in developed countries have the specific stock-picking ability, and can correctly predict the trend of stocks. It also finds that this predictive power of retail investors can, in part, be explained by the continuity of order flows. In contrast, the remaining predictive power shows that retail investors may possess corporate-level information about share prices.
Can Shorts Predict Returns? A Global Perspective, a paper co-authored by Dr. g Xinran Zhan, Prof. Xiaoyan Zhang from Tsinghua University, Prof. Ekkehart Boehmer from Singapore Management University, Prof. Zsuzsa R. Huszár from the National University of Singapore, and Prof. Yanchu Wang from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, was officially accepted by Review of Financial Studies, a world-class journal on finance. This paper investigates the shorting activities in 38 countries and regions’ stock markets and finds that shorting indicators have a strong predictive power over overstock returns. Such predictive power substantially affects markets where shorting restrictions are imposed and on stocks with low liquidity, high shorting cost, and low price efficiency.
Ripples into waves: trade networks, economic activity, and asset prices, a paper co-authored by the School of Finance’s Assistant Prof. Huancheng Du, Prof. Jinfan Zhang from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen), Prof. Dong Lou, and Prof. Christopher Polk from the London School of Economics and CEPR, was accepted by Journal of Financial Economics, a world-class journal on finance. This paper investigates the transmission mechanism of economic shocks among countries through price changes of sovereign CDSs and the international trade network. By studying the two natural experiments, i.e., the Japanese tsunami in 2011 and the COVID-19-induced Wuhan lockdown in 2020, the paper finds that the international trade network is an essential means of transmission for economic shocks. Observing the prices of sovereign CDSs further finds that economic shocks can both, directly and indirectly, transmit along with the trade network.
Dr. Xinran Zhang and Dr. Huancheng Du are two new teachers at the School of Finance, CUFE, introduced in 2021. As a graduate from the PBC School of Finance, Tsinghua University, and Ph.D. in economics, Dr. Zhang specializes in empirical asset pricing, international financial markets, and behavioral finance. As a graduate of American University, and Ph.D. in economics, Dr. Du focuses on studying asset pricing in financial markets, behavioral finance, and international finance. He used to work as a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University and a researcher at the Development Macroeconomics Division in the Research Department of the IMF.
