Job Market Candidate: Yanjie Wang

Yanjie Wang is a PhD Job Market Candidate at the UZH Department of Finance. He joined our academic program in the year 2019 and is supervised by Professor Michel Habib.

Dear Yanjie, nice to meet you! We’re genuinely curious to learn more about your journey—what inspired you to pursue an academic career?

I am inspired by the opportunity to explore new questions, gain fresh perspectives, and deepen my understanding of complex topics.

• Academia offers a platform to dive deeply into specialized fields and contribute insights that can make a meaningful impact on society.
• Working in academia fosters a collaborative community of individuals who share a commitment to learning and intellectual growth.
• I also enjoy teaching as it allows me to share knowledge, inspire curiosity, and engage directly with students in their own learning journeys.

What are your research interests?

My research interests focus on financial intermediation, corporate finance, and the application of machine learning in finance.

The title of your job market paper is: "Managerial Caution and Bank Returns during the Great Financial Crisis". Can you please explain your research paper in more detail.

My job market paper examines how cautious banks performed relative to their less cautious counterparts during and after the Great Financial Crisis. Addressing this question requires a precise definition of ‘caution’ and an identification strategy to isolate the effects of cautious behavior on bank performance.

What motivated you to pursue this research topic?

The recurring nature of financial crises highlights the importance of understanding their formation and development. My research aims to better equip us to anticipate and navigate future crises.

What are the key findings?

My findings indicate that cautious banks outperformed others by holding more cash as a fraction of cash and short-term investments and relying less on repurchase agreements as a fraction of total short-term borrowings.

Please share with us what unique contributions does your job market paper offer to the field?

My job market paper uses an interdisciplinary approach—integrating natural language processing, new empirical industrial organization, and reduced-form regressions—to provide new insights into how managerial caution influences bank performance during financial crises, on the basis of managerial communication in bank annual reports.

While the tone of managerial communication reflects both recent performance and future prospects, the latter unlike the former are unobservable. Methodologically, my job market paper shows how to obtain a quantitative measure of managerial prospects by combining machine learning methods and discrete choice models.

Thank you for taking the time for the interview. We wish you a lot of success for your job market applications!