Papers I Read (in detail)
Papers I read for my classes, papers I read for fun, papers I read to discuss my professor, papers I read for literature review... Of course, I read the introduction & methodology of countless papers, but here are the ones I read in detail and try to replicate sometimes.
February 18, 2024
I presented Shyam-Sunder and Myers (1998, JFE) and Chirinko & Singha (2000, JFE) capital structure papers in my Theoretical Corporate Finance class a week ago. This course is, most of the time, my favorite course this semester (except the moment Noah-Stoffman- explains the core of empirical asset pricing papers and helps me to understand economic intuition and those statistical results.) I really admire our Corporate Finance lecture notes prepared by Wenyu -Wang-. Therefore, I tried to create lecture notes like him in my paper presentation instead of preparing slides. I shared my notes with my classmates before the class, making it easier for them to follow me.
Also, for my Empirical Asset Pricing paper, I read "Cochrane's Dog Did Not Bark: A Defense of Return Predictability" (2008, RFS) and Gibbons, Ross, and Shanken's "A Test of the Efficiency of a Given Portfolio"(Econometrica, 1989). It is impressive to learn how statistical results can be interpreted in terms of finance.
While reading Cochrane's paper, I learned about "The Campbell-Shiller decomposition," here we use Taylor expansion to make function simpler, while in my corporate finance class, Goldstein, Ju, and Leland's (2001) paper uses Taylor expansion to show economic intuition behind the closed form solution.
Research Presentations
(Presentation from AFA 2024, Behavioral Asset Pricing session)
I always attend Kelley's research presentations if I do not have a class. From now on, I will share those under this title (Feb 3, 2024).
February 18, 2024
I have attended three different seminars/talks in the last two weeks.
Two of them were Research Brown Bag, and one of them was Teaching Brown Bag.
The first Brown Bag was a banking paper, I believe, synthesized with accounting. Presenting theory papers is always challenging for the presenter and the audience (if you are not clever enough!) Especially if you are expanding one of the old theories, which other people do not know anything about it. For example, in my Theoretical Corporate Finance class, our professor always mentioned, "Now literature starts from here," because someone had already done the basics. However, sometimes understanding those basics even takes more than an hour.
The other paper presented in the Brown Bag uses textual analysis (BERT). I also tried to analyze M&A announcements last semester. What I observe for these textual analysis papers:
The text we choose to analyze is really important. For example, in my case, M&A announcements did not provide much information to help you understand what is happening. Even when choosing a newspaper to analyze, WSJ, Bloomberg, and NYT have different stories. I believe we need a good reason to choose that text to analyze. Why not 10Ks, but analyst reports? Why Moody's? Why?
Nobody cares how we did the analysis. I read this advice in Cochrane's blog while he was giving advice to PhD students about writing. What is your accuracy level? What are your results?
Classification is a super important part of textual analysis, and we should consider it carefully before analyzing it.
Lastly, the first time I attended "Teaching Brown Bag," it was about how to "teach a case." Idie Kesner's methods, which are giving answer papers to students to put in front of them, were truly amazing. In my undergrad, I remember we used online platforms to say yes/no or choose options to decide something in the case. But first of all, it was anonymous. Secondly, we lost the first answer, which could be related to the second answer and create "friction." But if you provide option cards and yes/no signs to students to put them in their desks in the classroom (she showed them to us), the professor will know who said what, and let's say the student says "yes, it is a good industry," but then choose option A for a company which is "not enter" that industry advice. The professor can ask students "why" and help them understand what is illogical. I will try to attend one of her case-study classes with MBA students. Hopefully, I will share pictures of those cards with her permission.
General Updates & Notes
February 18, 2024
This week's goal is to get writing feedback from Mike (Woeppel) for my mock introduction for our paper, continue to work on it, and learn how to do event study with deep understanding. My PhD fellow Yong Seok (Kim) suggested the following paper for event study:
"Event Studies in Economics and Finance" (Mackinlay, 1997, Journal of Economic Literature).
Feb 4, Sunday - 2024
Today, I went for a quick 7 km Sunday run, and while running I listened to "The Hidden Curriculum."
The episode I chose was:
"Your brain loves a good plan." is my favorite quote from the episode. I also checked Patrick's website. I was trying to read Atomic Habits, but I was a little bit bored, to be honest. "Make Time" is my next stop.
Then, I went to Sebastian's website and found data-is-plural.com, which provides an interesting database newsletter!
Feb 3, Saturday - 2024
One of the biggest updates from last semester, my first year in Ph.D., I presented my research idea in my Ph.D. Brown Bag. The idea itself is already dead. But, the other time, I will tell my research idea the most on the 3rd slide of my presentation :) I was so into sharing my motivation, so at the end of the 5th slide, I was still pitching my motivation but did not mention the research question... I hope to keep my enthusiasm to share and get feedback for my research, though, since excitement is the most powerful side of my presentation!