Runjing Lu

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

 Accepted, Journal of Financial Economics. 

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

• Best Paper Award at the 2022 Michigan State FCU Conference 

• Selected conferences: 2024 AEA 

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

 R&R, Journal of Finance.​

• Covered in WSJ Real Time Economics

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

• Best Paper Prize at the 2021 Colorado Finance Summit

• Selected conferences: 2021 NBER SI Entrepreneurship 

• 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.

 R&R, Review of Financial Studies.

• Selected conferences: 2023 Kelly Holden

• 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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Roe v. Rates: Reproductive Healthcare and Public Financing Costs (w/ Zihan Ye). SSRN. 🚨New Paper🚨 Comments welcome!

• Selected conferences: 2023 FRA, 2024 AEA poster, 2024 Virtual Municipal Finance Workshop

• Summary: After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, states with abortion "trigger" bans see an increase in municipal bond yields relative to states with preexisting laws protecting abortion. The effects are stronger in counties where access to abortion services decrease more after the court ruling, where residents are more accepting of reproductive healthcare, and which rely more on female workforce. We identify deteriorated firm value, worsening business dynamism, and lower net in-migration as key factors underlying the rise in yields.  
   

Cross-State Strategic Voting (w/ Gordon Dahl, Joey Engelberg, and Will Mullins). SSRN.
​Reject & Resubmit, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

• Selected conferences: 2024 AEA

• Summary: We estimate that 3.1% of the US voter population is registered to vote in two states, opening up the possibility for them to choose where to vote. Double registration is 3.5 times more likely in the wealthiest 1\% of zip codes vs. the bottom quartile, giving wealthy Americans more voting power. Double-registrants respond to both incentives and costs, disproportionately choosing swing states (higher incentive) and states which automatically send out mail-in ballots (lower cost). While there are more Democrat double-registrants, Republicans are more responsive to swing-state incentives. The net effect did not alter the 2020 election, although it could change the outcome in closer elections. 
   

​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 Regression Discountnuity 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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