I am a tenure-track professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
I received my PhD from MIT in 2020. Before, I studied finance at Warwick Business School (UK) and business/economics in my hometown at the University of Göttingen (Germany).
I am broadly interested in corporate disclosure, corporate debt markets, and the real effects of secondary financial markets.
You can download my CV here.
Abstract: Observable market prices and trading are important information constructs that reveal information to market participants. I study how the observability of such market prices and trading (hereafter, “market transparency”) affects firms’ disclosure incentives. I exploit the staggered introduction of TRACE, which made bond prices and transactions publicly observable. I find that firms provide more guidance when their bonds’ prices/trading become observable, suggesting that investors’ access to market information limits managers’ incentives to withhold information. This effect is stronger for firms whose revealed prices contain more new information, and it is more pronounced for the disclosure of bad news. I corroborate my results using (i) a controlled experiment, in which prices/trading were revealed for randomly selected bonds, and also (ii) relevant threshold rules. Together, my results suggest that increased market transparency improves investors’ access to information not only directly, by revealing the information contained in returns/trading, but also indirectly, by increasing corporate disclosure.
Abstract: I study how mispricing in secondary bond markets affects corporate financing behavior. My mispricing measure exploits fund flow-driven fire-sells and purchases of bonds by mutual bond funds. I show that such fire-sales and purchases substantially dislocate bond prices from fundamentals, and prices take about one year to fully revert. Firms alter their debt issuance in response to such mispricing. The difference in net debt issuance between firms with recently fire-sold (underpriced) bonds and firms with recently fire-purchased (overpriced) bonds is equivalent to 0.26%-0.34% of assets. This change in net debt issuance is driven by long-term debt issuance, and it is not offset by corresponding changes in equity issuance or dividend payouts, suggesting that mispricing in secondary bond markets ultimately distorts the total allocation of capital across firms.
Abstract: We provide evidence that equity awards, which constitute a dominant share of CEO pay, are used to reward managers ex-post for realized performance in the preceding fiscal year. Many firms explicitly mention this practice in their proxy statements, and equity grants increase substantially with the firm’s performance for the immediately preceding year. This finding has important implications for the measurement of the pay-performance relationship. The convention of treating equity grants as compensation for the year of the grant, rather than for the preceding year, results in a severely underestimated pay-performance relationship, especially for firms relying heavily on equity as a means of compensation. We show that adjusting total compensation to include equity granted after the end of the fiscal year, as opposed to during the fiscal year of firm performance, more than doubles the pay-to-performance elasticity.
I have taught seminars and recitations (as a TA) since I was an undergrad. Below are the courses I taught and my median teaching ratings.
MIT
2019 — Financial Accounting (Rating: 7 / 7)
2019 — PhD Seminar - Disclosure Theory for Empiricists (Rating: 7/7)
2018 — Accounting for Managers (No Rating)
2015 — Financial Accounting (Rating: 6 / 7)
Warwick Business School
2014 — Financial Management (Rating: 5 / 5)
2014 — Financial Markets (Rating: 5 / 5)
University of Göttingen
2012 — Basic Corporate Finance (No Rating)
2011 — Basic Corporate Finance (No Rating)