Education

2006 -- present	The Ohio State University, Fisher College of Business Ph.D. in Finance (expected in June of 2012)
2003 -- 2006	The Ohio State University, M.S. in Physics
1999 -- 2003	University of Science and Techonology of China, B.S. in Physics

Research Interests
Empirical asset pricing, Financial Intitutions, Financial Crises, International Finance

Working Papers

"Does More Finance Lead to More Crises?" 2011

Economists have argued that finance can facilitate growth and increase stability. There are, however, reasons that finance, especially the quantity of credit, can be a source of instability. While there is a vigorous debate on the benefits and costs of the financial sector, there is no direct evidence of whether more finance is related to a higher probability of future systemic banking crises. By using panel data for 150 countries from 1960 to 2009, I find that a larger quantity of finance measured by the ratio of private credit to GDP is associated with a higher probability of future systemic banking crises, a result that is robust to excluding the recent global financial crisis. This effect is stronger for countries whose quantity of private credit is relatively larger. An increase in the equity market capitalization relative to the outstanding credit is associated with a lower probability of a systemic banking crisis.

"What Explains the Cross-country Differences in Stock Return Comovement? A Return Decomposition Analysis" 2011

In this paper, I study why stock returns comove more in some countries than in others using a sample of 38 countries from 1992 to 2007. I identify return comovement that can be attributed to comovement of cash-flow news and return comovement that can be attributed to comovement of discount-rate news. The discount-rate comovement is lower in countries that have better protection of property rights and better transparency of information environment, and the cash-flow comovement is not associated significantly with these country variables after controlling for the discount-rate effect. Furthermore, the discount-rate comovement is more important than the cash-flow comovement in explaining the cross-country differences in return comovement. These results are consistent with the view that country-specific departures from fundamentals in stock prices drive most of the cross-country variation of stock return comovement.

References

René M. Stulz Everett D. Reese Chair of Banking and Monetary Economics Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University E-mail: stulz_1@fisher.osu.edu; Tel: (614) 292-1970

Kewei Hou Associate Professor of Finance Fisher College of Business, Ohio State University E-mail: hou_28@fisher.osu.edu; Tel: (614) 292-0552

Mike S. Weisbach Professor and Ralph W. Kurtz Chair in Finance Fisher College of Business, Ohio State University E-mail: weisbach_2@fisher.osu.edu; Tel: (614) 292-3264

Jack Bao Assistant Professor of Finance Fisher College of Business, Ohio State University E-mail: bao_40@fisher.osu.edu; Tel: (614) 292-7712