Wei Jiang
Vice Dean for Faculty and Research and Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Finance | Emory University, Goizueta Business School
ATLANTA, GA, UNITED STATES
A leading finance scholar with extensive leadership roles.
Links (1)
Biography
Wei Jiang earned her PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago in 2001. She is a Fellow and Board Member of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI), and a Research Associate of the NBER (Law and Economics, and Corporate Finance). Jiang's main research interests lie in corporate governance, institutional investors, technology and financial markets. She has published extensively in top finance, economics, and law journals, and received numerous awards for research excellence. She served as Editor at Review of Financial Studies and Management Science. Prior to joining the faculty at Emory in 2022, Jiang was the Arthur F. Bruns Professor of Free Competitive Enterprise at Columbia Business School, Columbia University, where she served as Vice Dean of Curriculum and Programs. Jiang is currently the President-elect of the American Finance Association and was previously the President of the Society of Financial Studies.
Education (2)
University of Chicago: PhD, Economics 2001
Fudan University: MS & BA, Economics 1992
Areas of Expertise (4)
Corporate Finance
Corporate Governance
Technology and Financial Markets
Law and Finance
Publications (6)
Mapping US-China Technology Decoupling, Innovation, and Firm Performance
Management Science2025 We develop measures of technology decoupling and dependence between the United States and China based on combined patent data. The first two decades of the century witnessed a steady increase in technology integration (or less decoupling), but China’s dependence on the United States increased (decreased) during the first (second) decade. Firms covered by China’s Strategic Emerging Industries policies became less decoupled with the United States, gained cash flows, and gained valuation, but they saw no improvement in either innovation output/quality or productivity. Post-U.S. sanctions, firms in sanctioned sectors and their downstream suffered in performance but also became less decoupled with the United States. However, firms in the upstream of the sanctioned sectors improved productivity and produced more high-quality innovations.
From Man vs. Machine to Man + Machine: The Art and AI of Stock Analyses
Journal of Financial Economics2024 An AI analyst trained to digest corporate disclosures, industry trends, and macroeconomic indicators surpasses most analysts in stock return predictions. Nevertheless, humans win “Man vs. Machine” when institutional knowledge is crucial, e.g., involving intangible assets and financial distress. AI wins when information is transparent but voluminous. Humans provide significant incremental value in “Man + Machine,” which also substantially reduces extreme errors. Analysts catch up with machines after “alternative data” become available if their employers build AI capabilities. Documented synergies between humans and machines inform how humans can leverage their advantage for better adaptation to the growing AI prowess.
Shareholder Monitoring Through Voting: New Evidence from Proxy Contest
Review of Financial Studies2024 We present the first comprehensive study of mutual fund voting in proxy contests. Among contests where voting takes place, passive funds are 10 percentage points less likely than active funds to vote for dissidents. The gap shrinks significantly when accounting for votes withheld from management nominees, settled contests, and votes by non-“Big-Three” fund families. Passive and active funds are equally informed about firm fundamentals, although passive funds view contest-related SEC filings more often than active funds during contests, in absolute levels and incrementally relative to noncontest periods. We conclude that passive funds are engaged shareholders in high-stakes voting events.
How to Talk when a Machine is Listening: Corporate Disclosure in the Age of AI
Review of Financial Studies2023 Growing AI readership (proxied for by machine downloads and ownership by AI-equipped investors) motivates firms to prepare filings friendlier to machine processing and to mitigate linguistic tones that are unfavorably perceived by algorithms. Loughran and McDonald (2011) and BERT available since 2018 serve as event studies supporting attribution of the decrease in the measured negative sentiment to increased machine readership. This relationship is stronger among firms with higher benefits to (e.g., external financing needs) or lower cost (e.g., litigation risk) of sentiment management. This is the first study exploring the feedback effect on corporate disclosure in response to technology.
Diversity Through Turnover: How to Overcome the Glacial Pace Toward Board Diversity?
Journal of Law, Finance, and Accounting2023 Prior to 2009, women made up about 8% of the directors of US corporate boards. That proportion has since risen to 19% in 2019 among public firms, while private firms have not witnessed notable improvement. This study highlights the general lack of board turnover, i.e., long tenure enjoyed by the incumbents, as a key factor in the slow adjustment. Proxy contests (contested board elections) resulting from shareholder activism, by increasing the board turnover rate, have contributed to improved gender diversity on the boards of the target companies, despite the fact that activist directors are no more gender-diverse compared to new directors added to the boards in the absence of such contests.
Dissemination, Publication, and Impact of Finance Research: When Novelty Meets Conventionality
Review of Finance2023 Using numeric and textual data extracted from over 50,000 finance articles in SSRN during 2001--2019, we examine the relationship between measured qualities and a paper’s readership, eventual outlet, and impact. Conventionality (semantic similarity with existent research) helps boost readership and publication prospects. However, novelty in the forms of emerging topics and databases are associated with better publishing outcomes. Studies that do not easily map into established finance subfields or that introduce non-finance elements face a higher hurdle. Finally, papers whose research questions span multiple fields are a hard sell, but those building on prior knowledge from multiple fields are valued.
In the News (1)
Disney, Bob Iger Defeat Activist Nelson Peltz in Shareholder Vote
WSJ online
2024-04-03
Investors support company’s slate of board nominees; Peltz loses bid to become a director in win for the Disney CEO.
