Yihui Pan

About

Yihui Pan is an Associate Professor of Finance at the David Eccles School of Business, University of Utah. His research focuses on corporate finance, industrial organization, and labor economics, with a particular interest in understanding the strategic decisions of firms and the impact of these decisions on labor markets.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Finance
• Business
• Financial economics
• Economics
• Commerce
• Accounting
• Marketing
• Monetary economics
• Geography

Selected publications

• Learning About CEO Ability and Stock Return Volatility

  Review of Financial Studies · 2015-02-11 · 197 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Consistent with predictions from a stylized Bayesian learning model stock return volatility declines with CEO tenure in a convex manner, even for CEOs whose appointments occur for exogenous reasons. The decline is faster when there is higher uncertainty about the CEO's ability when there is more transparency about the firm's prospects, and when CEO ability is more important in value creation. We quantify the importance of uncertainty about CEO ability relative to the firm's fundamental cash flow…

  PublisherDOI

• The Cultural Origin of CEOs’ Attitudes toward Uncertainty: Evidence from Corporate Acquisitions

  Review of Financial Studies · 2019-09-27 · 176 citations

  article1st author

  Abstract We examine the role of cultural heritage in shaping U.S. CEOs’ attitudes toward uncertainty, in the context of their corporate acquisition decisions. We find that CEOs with a more uncertainty-avoiding cultural heritage are less likely to engage in acquisitions. Conditional on making an acquisition, uncertainty-averse CEOs prefer targets in familiar industries and targets that can be more easily integrated. The emphasis on cultural identity by CEOs’ parents and the ethnic composition of…

  PublisherDOI

• CEO Investment Cycles

  Review of Financial Studies · 2016-05-14 · 146 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This paper documents the existence of a CEO investment cycle, in which disinvestment decreases over a CEO's tenure, while investment increases, leading to “cyclical” firm growth in assets and employment. The estimated variation in investment rate over the CEO investment cycle is of the same order of magnitude as the differences caused by business cycles or financial constraints. Results from a number of tests generally support the view that the investment cycle is caused by agency problems, lead…

  PublisherDOI

• Do Equity Markets Care <b>about Income Inequality? Evidence from Pay Ratio Disclosure</b>

  The Journal of Finance · 2022 · 125 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT We examine equity markets’ reaction to the first‐time disclosure of the CEO‐worker pay ratio by U.S. public companies in 2018. We find that firms disclosing higher pay ratios experience significantly lower abnormal announcement returns. Firms whose shareholders are more inequality‐averse experience a more negative market response to high pay ratios. Furthermore, during 2018 more inequality‐averse investors rebalance their portfolios away from stocks with a high pay ratio relative to oth…

  PublisherDOI

• The Determinants and Impact of Executive-Firm Matches

  Management Science · 2015-12-18 · 88 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  I estimate a model of executive-firm matching, in which both components of the executive labor market outcome—the assignment of managers to firms and the cross-sectional distribution of executive pay—are endogenously determined. Results in this paper reveal the importance of match specificity in productivity, driven by complementarities between firm and manager attributes. Therefore, one reason that larger, more diversified, research-intensive firms pay their executives more is because they are…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Tracy Yue Wang

  University of Minnesota

  64 shared

• Michael S. Weisbach

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  54 shared

• Stephan Siegel

  11 shared

• Rachel M. Hayes

  3 shared

• Feng Jiang

  University of British Columbia

  3 shared

• Elena Pikulina

  University of British Columbia

  3 shared

• Po-Hsuan Hsu

  National University of Singapore

  2 shared

• Kai Li

  Northwest University

  2 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Statistics

  University of California, Berkeley

  2008

• M.S., Statistics

  University of California, Berkeley

  2005

• B.S., Mathematics

  University of Science and Technology of China

  2003

Awards & honors

• Best Paper Award, China International Finance Conference, 20…
• David Eccles Emerging Scholar Award, 2016
• Risk Institute Research Grant, Ohio State University, 2016
• Shmuel Kandel Award, Utah Winter Finance Conference, 2011

Similar researchers at University of Utah

• Karl Linsh-64
• Jeffrey L. Colesh-41
• Avner Kalayh-32