Job Market Paper

Best Paper Award, 2025 Rutgers Accounting Doctoral Symposium

Presentations:  Harvard Seminar in Environmental Economics and Policy (scheduled), 35th Conference on Financial Economics and Accounting (scheduled), D^3 Climate and Sustainability Impact Lab at Harvard Business School, Program for Research in Markets and Organizations (PRIMO), 2025 Rutgers Accounting Doctoral Symposium (RADS), 7th Greater Boston Corporate Governance Workshop, Harvard Business School

This study examines whether Citizen-Generated Information (CGI)—a new form of public data enabled by low-cost technology—can enhance corporate accountability by disciplining corporate pollution behavior. Using the staggered rollout of the PurpleAir sensor network and a stacked difference-in-differences design, I find that the presence of a new sensor is associated with a 6% to 8% reduction in a facility’s fugitive air emissions, an economically meaningful effect. This emissions reduction is driven by an enhanced regulatory scrutiny: inspections significantly increase for both federal (EPA) and state agencies. I further show that these agencies use CGI for strategically different purposes. The EPA uses the data as an information substitute to target previously unmonitored areas, while state agencies use it as a monitoring complement to target known high-emitting firms. Overall, these findings demonstrate how a decentralized, public information source can serve as a governance mechanism for corporate externalities.

With Shirley Lu and George Serafeim

Prepare to Submit 

Presentations: AAA Annual Meeting 2024 (Nguyen), ARCS 16th Annual Research Conference (Nguyen), Harvard Kennedy School (Serafeim), Peking University (Lu), Harvard Business School (Nguyen)

Reducing corporate carbon emissions requires coordinated action across functions, yet employees often hold divergent beliefs about climate change, which can hinder execution. We examine whether spreading decarbonization-related incentives across more functional units is associated with more decarbonization. Using firm disclosures, we construct a measure of incentive diffusion and decompose changes in Scopes 1 and 2 emissions to separate efficiency and energy-source improvements from changes in scale, business mix, or measurement. Total emissions change shows no relation to incentive diffusion. By contrast, greater diffusion is consistently associated with larger reductions from efficiency and energy-source changes, highlighting the value of disaggregation of the overall decarbonization metric. To explore the mechanism of this relation, we develop a firm-level proxy for belief misalignment based on the climate opinions likely held by employees across the firm’s operating footprint. Real decarbonization is lower when misalignment is high, but the positive association between incentive diffusion and real reductions is stronger in such settings. Our findings highlight the value of cross-unit incentives and of distinguishing real decarbonization from other sources of emissions change.

With Charles Wang

R&R (Journal of Law and Economics)

Presentations: American Law and Economics Association 2024 Meeting (Nguyen), Transatlantic Doctoral Conference (Nguyen), Financial Markets and Corporate Governance Conference (Nguyen), Harvard Business School (Wang), Harvard Law School (Wang), NYU Stern School of Business (Wang), Midwest Finance Association Conference (Wang)

We examine how stewardship codes impact investor voting in contested ballot measures, in which the Institutional Shareholder Services recommends against management. Code adoption increased shareholder votes against management for certain firms: those without significant U.S. investor presence before adoption. These changes are driven in part by U.S. investors: stewardship codes led them to invest in a broader set of companies in adopting jurisdictions, impacting company-level shareholder voting patterns. These findings support the hypothesis that stewardship codes act as a “halo” signal of a jurisdiction's commitment to international standards of good corporate governance.

Coverage: The CLS Blue Sky Blog

Solo-authored 

Financial support from the John M. Olin Empirical Law and Finance Fellowship

Presentations: ARCS 15th Annual Research Conference’s Ph.D. Workshop, Harvard Business School

I examine the unique setting in the UK – the update of the UK Stewardship Code 2020 – which combines principles-based reporting and regulator green certification in the context of disclosing ESG-related investment activities. This version of the code asks investment companies to comply with all the principles, and also issues the list of signatories annually to make sure signatories continue to improve their reporting as market practice and expectations evolve. Employing a difference-in-differences design, I present evidence that investors value green certification. All else equal, in the post-adoption period, sustainable funds monthly receive on average 7.66 million USD more than conventional funds, which is more than 2 times the fund flow of sustainable funds in the pre-period. Conditional on being sustainable funds, being a signatory leads to net inflows while not being a signatory leads to net outflows. I also present evidence suggesting the signatory sustainable funds and the non-signatory sustainable funds are not different in terms of excess returns, tracking errors, and weighted portfolio ESG risk, suggesting the fund inflow reaction is attributed to the content and quality of the disclosure.