Runjing Lu

Partisan Entrepreneurship (w/ Joey Engelberg, Jorge Guzman, Will Mullins). SSRN. NBER. 

 R&R at The Journal of Finance.

• Best Paper Prize in Corporate Finance at the 2022 MFA Conference 

• Best Paper Prize at the 2021 Colorado Finance Summit

• Covered in WSJ Real Time Economics

• Summary: we show that Republicans start more firms than Democrats, and that this difference is time-varying: Republicans increase their relative entrepreneurship during Republican administrations and decrease it during Democratic administrations (and vice versa).

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Partisan Sentiment and Innovation: Evidence from Patenters (w/ Joey Engelberg, Will Mullins, and Rick Townsend). SSRN.

• Summary: We show that Democrat inventors are more likely to patent (relative to Republicans) after Obama's 2008 election but less likely so after Trump's 2016 victory. We also show a large drop in patenting by Immigrant inventors (relative to non-immigrants) after the 2016 election. Finally, we document an increasing trend in partisan concentration by technology class and firm and a decreasing tendency to form mixed-party teams over the past two decades. 

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The Social Signal (w/ Tony Cookson, Will Mullins, and Marina Niessner). SSRN.

• Best Paper Prize in Investments and Asset Pricing at the 2023 MFA Conference

• Best Paper Award at the 2022 Michigan State FCU Conference 

• Summary: we study social media attention and sentiment from three major platforms: Twitter, StockTwits, and Seeking Alpha. We find that attention is highly correlated across platforms, but sentiment is not. We also find that sentiment and attention are both positively related to retail trading imbalance, but contain different return-relevant information. Sentiment-induced retail trading imbalance predicts positive next-day returns, but attention-induced imbalance predicts strongly negative next-day returns. These results highlight the practical importance of distinguishing between social media sentiment and attention.

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​Stale Information in the Spotlight: The Effects of Attention Shocks on Equity Markets (w/ Siyu Chen). SSRN.​

• Best Doctoral Paper Prize in Financial Markets at the 2018 SWFA

• Summary: Using a RD design, we study the causal impact of an influential star analyst award on market reaction and analysts’ post-award performance. Award announcement leads to higher market reaction to stocks with preexisting recommendations from barely winners than those from barely nonwinners. Evidence strongly suggests that attention trading and speculative trading are the main driving force. 

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Cross-State Strategic Voting (w/ Gordon Dahl, Joey Engelberg, and Will Mullins). SSRN.

• Summary: We estimate 3% of the U.S. voter population is registered to vote in two states. Which state these double-registrants choose to vote in reflects incentives and costs, being more prevalent in swing states (higher incentive) and states which automatically send out mail-in ballots (lower cost). We call this behavior cross-state strategic voting (CSSV) and estimate there were 317,000 such votes in the 2020 presidential election. Because both Democrats and Republicans engaged in CSSV, the net effect was small, although it could matter in closer elections (e.g., Florida in 2000) or if one party increased CSSV relative to the other.

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