Research
Research
Information and Innovation: Evidence From Railroad Expansion in the Nineteenth Century (Solo-Authored)
I study how access to information shapes invention by exploiting the staggered expansion of the U.S. railroad network and the mail it carried between 1840 and 1900. Using a new dataset that links the railroad mail routes recorded by the U.S. Post Office Department to the underlying rail network, I find that counties gaining railroad access produced about eleven percent more patents over the following five years than comparable counties without it, and that the gains were larger where mail service was more frequent and more extensive. I find no improvement, on average, in patent quality, though patent quality declined in counties without prior water access and rose where waterways already existed. Using large-language-model embeddings of patent text, I further show that connected counties' patents grew more similar in content, and more so to those of ordinary counties than to those of the established innovation centers. The patenting advantage widened as the postal reforms of 1845 to 1863 lowered the cost of mailing, and patenting fell where the Post Office discontinued Southern mail service during the Civil War. Together, these findings point to the flow of information as a channel through which railroad expansion raised patenting in the counties the mail reached.
Presentations: 2026 Northern Finance Association Annual Meeting (scheduled), 2026 AFA PhD Student Poster Session, 2025 FMA Doctoral Student Consortium, San Diego State University, California State University San Marcos, Georgia State University
The Value of Stock Analysis in News  (with Zhen Shi, Yusen Xia, and Baozhong Yang)
This study examines whether financial journalism provides value-relevant insights beyond corporate disclosures. Using large language models, we match news coverage in WSJ articles to firm disclosures in 8-K filings and decompose news content into components that reiterate corporate releases and that provide incremental information and analysis. We find that WSJ articles incorporate substantial analytical commentary on macroeconomic conditions, competitive dynamics, regulatory challenges, and technological innovations. Sentiment in this incremental analysis predicts substantial short-term abnormal returns, long-term stock performance, and future operating performance. Effects are more pronounced among firms with high information asymmetry. Our findings demonstrate that financial journalism delivers material insights beyond regulatory disclosures, thereby enhancing price discovery in capital markets.
Presentations: The 5th Frontiers of Factor Investing Conference, Georgia State University, The 38th Australasian Finance and Banking Conference - Keynote Speech*, Georgia State University RISE Success Forum 2024 (*presented by a co-author)
The Impact of Improved Accessibility through Railroads on Entrepreneurship (with Jing (Sophia) Xue and Baozhong Yang)
A Dataset for Historical Innovation Studies: The Demographics of Innovators in the 19th and 20th Centuries (with Tania Babina, Jing (Sophia) Xue and Baozhong Yang)