The Ronald and Maxine Linde Institute of Economic and Management Sciences is pleased to announce the selection of four students in Caltech's Social Sciences PhD program to receive graduate fellowships to support their research this summer. The 2016 Linde Institute Summer Fellows are Jun Chen, Marcelo Fernandez, Pengfei Sui, and Jun Zhang.
Jun Chen's general research interest lies in entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial finance. Currently, he is working on projects related to equity crowdfunding. For example, one question he is currently studying is what market mechanism can mitigate information asymmetry in equity crowdfunding. This summer, he is developing projects related to venture capital and angel investing and studying questions such as how venture-capital–backed companies are different from those backed by other sources.
Marcelo Fernandez works in the area of market design. He is interested in understanding how agents behave in markets according to the rules that govern them and how this information is used to (re)design institutional frameworks so that they are conductive to desirable outcomes. By looking at behavior through the lenses of regret avoidance, his research explores why a particular set of market rules performs well in practice, despite the theoretical availability of opportunities to "game the system." During the coming months, he plans to design and implement a laboratory experiment to help validate his research results.
Pengfei Sui's research interests include asset pricing and behavioral finance. In his third-year paper, he built a continuous-time dynamic equilibrium model of incorrect beliefs to explain a broad set of facts, including the high volatility during bubble episodes, negative correlation between subjective expectations of returns and model-implied expected returns, and countercyclical Sharpe ratio. In the next stage of his research, he plans to test investors' belief biases in the markets, with a special interest in using structural models from industrial organization literature.
Jun Zhang researches microeconomic theory. This summer, he is working on a project that compares different mechanisms of assigning children to public schools. In particular, he studies how heterogeneous sophistication of children and their parents affects the performance of different mechanisms.