WANG Renxuan

Research - WANG Renxuan 王任轩

WANG Renxuan

Research


Fascinated by financial markets, my research centers around how investors price assets under real-world constraints.


A key theme of my research builds on the idea that investors navigate markets with imperfect information and must learn from data to form their subjective expectations. A series of my papers show such a fundamental challenge shapes how investors form their expectations about stock returns (paper 2, paper 3), firm earnings (paper 4), house prices (paper 1), and macroeconomic conditions (paper 5), which in turn sheds light on some puzzling market pricing patterns.

Information, Learning and Subjective Expectations (click to expand)
1. Understanding Rationality and Disagreement in House Price Expectations
The Review of Financial Studies (Forthcoming)
w/ Zigang Li (Toronto) and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh (Columbia)
PDF SSRN

Seemingly puzzling patterns in house price growth forecasts are largely consistent with a model in which forecasters are uncertain about future long-run house price growth and have different prior beliefs. We employ large-scale cloud computing and a state-of-the-art learning model to demonstrate this effect based on a novel dataset.

Hdfda
Consensus forecast of house price growth in the US (2000-2023).

Keywords

Uncertainty Human Learning Cloud Computing Disagreement
2. Asset Prices When Investors Underestimate Discount Rate Dynamics
Conditionally Accepted at The Review of Asset Pricing Studies
Sole authored, Chapter 2 of Ph.D. Thesis
PDF SSRN

Investors underestimate the volatility of discount rates, which leads to asset pricing anomalies. A measure based on this underestimation explains 12 prominent cross-sectional anomalies.

Discount Rate Analysis
Distribution of Difference Between Subjective vs. Objective Discount Rate Volatility

Keywords

Individual Stocks Pricing Anomalies Systematic Trading Strategy Valuation
3. Subjective Return Expectations
Working Paper
Sole authored, Chapter 1 of Ph.D. Thesis
PDF SSRN

Wall Street and Main Street expectations about future stock returns are persistently opposed to each other. I demonstrate that this disagreement persists when they hold divergent views regarding how fundamental news relates to future stock prices.

Return Expectations Analysis
Expected Stock Market Returns of Wall Street vs. Main Street Investors

Keywords

Main Street vs Wall Street Disagreement Noisy Signals Fundamental Analysis
4. Uncertainty and Market Efficiency: An Information Choice Perspective
Working Paper
With Harrison Ham (Clemson), Zhongjin Lu (Georgia), Katherine Wood (Bentley), Biao Yang (Shanghai Jiao Tong)
PDF SSRN

Uncertainty variations lead to opposite relationships with market efficiency over-time vs. cross-firm. We build an information-choice model to demonstrate this theoretically and confirm it empirically using analysts' forecast biases.

Market Efficiency Analysis
The Opposing Relationships Between Uncertainty and Market Efficiency in the Time-Series vs. Cross-Section (Left) of Stock Market

Keywords

Uncertainty Machine Learning Earnings Forecasts Information Processing
5. The Effects of Monetary Policy on Macroeconomic Expectations: High-Frequency Evidence from Traded Event Contracts
Working Paper
With Eric T. Swanson (UC Irvine) and Yanbin Wu (Florida)
PDF SSRN

Traders in the Kalshi event contract markets are believers in the standard monetary policy transmission channels rather than the ‘Fed Information Effects.’ We use novel high-frequency data to identify this effect.

Monetary Policy Analysis

Keywords

Binary Event Contracts Macro Expectations Fed Policy Inflation Expectations

Recently, I've started to dive into the details in the Chinese financial markets and analyze how the trends of ESG Investing, (de-)globalization and governments' industrial policies impact asset prices and capital markets.

Chinese Financial Markets & Emerging Trends (click to expand)
6. Globalization, ESG Investing and Emerging Market Cost of Capital
Working Paper
With Adrien Alvero (Balyasny) and Zheyang Zhu (Cornell)
PDF SSRN

The globalization of capital flows to emerging markets brings down green firms' cost of capital more than that of brown firms. We analyze a proprietary dataset and the liberalization of China's onshore bond market to document this differential effect.

ESG Investment Analysis
Global capital flows and the returns of green vs. brown firms

Keywords

Globalization ESG Chinese Bond Market Institutional Demand
7. What Drives the Dynamics of CSR Returns?
Working Paper
w/ Russ Wermers (Maryland), Ruoke Yang (SEC), Hugo Zhao (Maryland)
PDF

We reconcile the findings of two influential studies that arrive at seemingly contradictory conclusions regarding whether green stocks outperform during economic downturns. We further use a classical asset pricing framework to discuss the drivers of green minus brown returns.

CSR Returns Analysis

Keywords

ESG Business Cycles Green vs Brown Risk Premium
8. Industrial Policy via IPOs
Work in Progress
w/ Zhiguo He, Sun Xi and Yiming Qiang

Examining how China's IPO approval process serves industrial policy objectives.

9. Sustainable Success: How High ESG Ratings Affect Stock Market Responses to Earnings Surprises
Finance Research Letters, 2024
With Xuewu Wang (Delaware) and Zhipeng Yan (Shanghai Jiao Tong)

High ESG ratings mitigate negative market reactions to earnings disappointments.

ESG Ratings Analysis