Yu Zhou

Yu Zhou

Yu Zhou

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Finance at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). I received a B.S. and M.S. in Finance from Wuhan University. My research interests are in credit markets, financial intermediary, and sustainable finance. I am on the 2024-2025 academic job market.

yzhoudf at connect dot ust dot hk

Curriculum Vitae

Working Paper

  • Climate Policy Transmission through Bond Fund Flows (Job Market Paper)
    • Presented at HKUST
    • Abstract: I show that bond funds facilitate the bond market transmission of climate policies primarily through the fund-flow channel. When climate policies become stringent, bond funds with high carbon exposure experience outflows and scale down their holdings relative to others. Across firms, in response to the tightening climate policies, those predominately held by these funds experience large and persistent yield increase, issue less debt, and cut real investment. To quantify this channel’s magnitudes, I estimate a demand system and find that fund flows account for a large share of bond yield sensitivity to climate policy. By conducting counterfactuals, I show that the efficacy of the fund-flow channel can be improved if existing funds are more differentiated in their carbon exposure.
  • Why Do CEO Compensation Schemes Feature Convexity? Evidence From a Natural Experiment
    • Presented at HKUST, AFA Poster
    • Abstract: We provide causal evidence of CEO compensation schemes featuring convexity to provide risk-taking incentives. Specifically, we leverage the Federal Trademark Dilution Act signed in 1996 which granted additional legal protection to selected trademarks against dilution. We argue that this made risky product-market expansion more appealing to shareholders of firms with protected trademarks because product differentiation is guaranteed. We show that firms significantly increase the convexity of CEO compensation in response to exogenous increases in investment opportunities. And this increase in convexity is more pronounced for firms whose brands are well recognized, products are more substitutable, and CEOs have more career concerns.
    • [slides]

Publication

  • Disclosure Policies in All-pay Auctions with Bid Caps and Stochastic Entry (with Bo Chen, Lijun Ma, Zhaobo Zhu), Economics Letters (2020)
    • Presented at WHU
    • Abstract: This paper examines the effects of disclosing the actual number of bidders in contests with stochastic entry and with resource constraint. We study an all-pay auction with complete information. The auction entails one prize and potential bidders. Each potential bidder has an exogenous probability of participation and faces an exogenous bid cap. It is shown that the contest organizer prefers fully concealing the information about the number of participating bidders. We extend the result to a case with endogenous entry.
    • [slides]