Seminar (Dept. of Finance)

Theme：How to talk when a machine is listening?: Corporate disclosure in the age of AI

Speaker：Wei Jiang, Columbia University，Arthur F. Burns Professor of Free and Competitive Enterprise in the Finance and Economics Division

Time：2022-02-25 09:00

Address：Zoom Meeting

Language：English

Venue：Zoom Meeting

https://zoom.us/j/87279844783?pwd=VVJ1WGg5NWgwMkRpck4xSW5tNURkdz09 

Meeting ID：872 7984 4783

password：0225

ABSTRACT:

Growing AI readership, proxied by expected machine downloads, motivates firms to prepare filings that are friendlier to machine parsing and processing. Firms avoid words that are perceived as negative by computational algorithms, as compared to those deemed negative only by dictionaries meant for human readers. The publication of Loughran and McDonald (2011) serves as an instrumental event attributing the difference-in-differences in the measured sentiment to machine readership. High machine-readership firms also exhibit speech emotion assessed as embodying more positivity and excitement by audio processors. This is the first study exploring the feedback effect on corporate disclosure in response to technology.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY:

Wei Jiang is Arthur F. Burns Professor of Free and Competitive Enterprise in the Finance and Economics Division. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Program on Corporate Governance at Harvard Law School, a Research Associate of the NBER—Law and Economics, and a member of the Committee on Capital Market Regulation.

Professor Jiang's main research interests lie in corporate governance, institutional investors, and technology and financial markets. She pioneered research in hedge fund activism. She has published extensively in top economics, finance, and law journals, and her research has been frequently featured in major media, including the Wall Street Journal, Economist, Institutional Investors, Money, Fortune, Business Week, New York Times and Financial Times. She received numerous awards for research excellence, including the Smith-Breeden and DFA Distinguished Paper Prizes from the Journal of Finance, the Michael J. Brennan Best Paper Award from the Review of Financial Studies, and the Jensen Prize from the Journal of Financial Economics, as well as the best paper prizes from the Western Finance Association, Chicago Quantitative Alliance, UK Inquire, the Q-Group, and the IRRC Institute. Previously she served as an editor of the Review of Financial Studies, a Finance Department Editor at Management Science and an Associate Editor at the Journal of Finance.

Professor Jiang has taught courses in Corporate Finance, Corporate Governance, Activist Investing, Empirical Methods in Finance Research, and Panel Data Econometrics in the Master, MBA/EMBA, and Ph.D. programs, and has received numerous teaching excellence awards. She was the Vice Dean for Curriculum and Instruction at Columbia Business School from 2016 to 2019.

Professor Jiang received her B.A. and M.A. in international economics from Fudan University (China), and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 2001.