Welcome to my website! I’m a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. I received my PhD in Finance from the University of Pittsburgh in 2023. I am an Advisory Editor for the Review of Financial Studies since September, 2023.

I work in the area of empirical corporate finance. My research focuses on Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A), labor finance with an emphasis on inventors, corporate innovation, and climate finance. I am also interested in empirical banking.

You can download my CV here and reach me by Email: l.wang@jbs.cam.ac.uk

Peer-reviewed Publications

• Housing Booms and Bank Growth (with M.Flannery and Leming Lin), Journal of Financial Intermediation, 52, 100993, 2022

Working Papers and Selected Work in Progress

• The Human Capital Reallocation of M&A: Inventor-level analysis (JMP)
  Abstract

  Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) of innovative firms lead to significant inventor restructuring, with high turnover among target inventors. Following M&As, both retained and departing inventors show increased patenting performance. Acquirers retain productive inventors whose expertise aligns with the merging firms, while external hires bring knowledge from non-core areas. Productivity gains for inventors switching jobs are concentrated among non-top performers and those with higher technological overlap at their new employers. These findings suggest that M&As reduce labor market frictions for inventors, reallocating them to more valuable roles within and beyond the merging firms.
• Innovation Ripples: The Impact of Departed Inventors after M&As
  Abstract

  This paper studies the impact of departed inventors after M&As on non-merging firms. Following M&As in innovative firms, the non-merging firms hiring these departed inventors from merging firms significantly improve their patenting performance. Further, I use the state-level variation in the enforceability of non-compete agreements as an instrument for the firms hiring these inventors to establish the causal relationship of the spillover effect. The existence of positive spillover effects suggests that the benefits of mergers are plausibly underestimated and extend beyond the merging companies.

• Antitrust Regulations and Corporate Innovation Strategies: Evidence from the 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines, with Gaurav Kankanhalli and Daniel Ferres

• ESG-driven Corporate Divestments, with Frederik Schlingemann and René Stulz

• Firm innovation and Accounting Quality, with Jenny Chu and Kai Wai Hui

Book Chapter

• Corporate Cash Holding, with David J. Denis, Handbook of Corporate Finance, 2024