Welcome to my website! I am an assistant professor at Copenhagen Business School. I obtained my PhD in Finance from Stockholm School of Economics. I am interested in banking, corporate finance, and financial intermediation. You can find my CV here and some of my ongoing projects below.

Email: yingjiee.qi@gmail.com

Address: Solbjerg Pl. 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark

Working papers

Abstract: Financial influencers (finfluencers) are on the rise and many people—especially those who are young—are increasingly exposed to their advice. However, we lack evidence on whether and how much these finfluencers impact their followers’ decisions. This paper studies the real transactions on both equity and non-equity investments made by investors on an online trading platform and sheds light on the characteristics, behavior, and impact of finfluencers. We find that higher past returns, longer trading histories, and lower communication costs increase popularity. In addition, finfluencers do generate significant impact on their followers, and selling is more impactful than buying. Lastly, we find suggestive evidence that finfluencers monetize their popularity and generate trading volume for the platform. 

Abstract: The increasingly lengthy trade credit maturity creates uncertainty and financial constraints for suppliers. Using novel invoice-, contract-, and firm-level data, this paper studies how a recent innovation in trade credit industry---Supply Chain Finance (SCF)---reduces suppliers' financial constraints and improves supply chain efficiency. We compare SCF with traditional factoring and document its effects. Preliminary analyses show that both suppliers and buyers reduce their borrowing of bank debt upon joining the program. While suppliers see an increase in employment, sales, and investment, buyers are largely unaffected. Overall, evidence suggests that SCF increases supply chain efficiency but also raises the concern over hidden debt.

Conferences: CICF 2023

Abstract:   We document the effects of higher borrowing cost on private firms in the presence of financial frictions by exploiting a quasi-experiment and a unique and comprehensive dataset from Sweden. In June 2010, the central bank of Sweden increased the repo rate unexpectedly and exposed firms with long term loan maturing right before or after the hike to different cost of borrowing. Consistent with the debt overhang theory, we find that higher cost of borrowing has a significant negative effect on investment, but more for highly levered firms. These results are robust to carefully controlling for firms' credit demand. Our findings highlight the importance of balance sheet heterogeneity in the responsiveness of firms to interest rate shocks.

Conferences: CEPR Second Annual Spring Symposium in Financial Economics (PhD poster session)

Publications

Abstract: This paper investigates how cross-selling affects relationship lending with internal data of a large bank and the Swedish credit registry. I show that within a bank-firm relationship, profit earned from non-loan products cross-subsidizes loans and increases 1) credit supply and 2) lenience in delinquency. For identification, I exploit the Basel II-induced exogenous variation in products' profitability while holding constant the firms' creditworthiness and relationship informativeness. I find that the average affected firms experienced a decrease of 6.1% ($400,000) in credit supply and 24% (9.9 pp) in lenience in delinquency.  The results inform optimal regulatory design for lenders who multi-produce. 

Conferences: AFA 2021, CICF 2021, EFA 2020, European Central Bank Young Economists’ Competition 2020 

Awards:  Peter Högfeldt Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis 2022,  ECB Young Economists' Competition Finalist 2020, Handelsbanken Doctoral Award 2019, EFA Doctoral Tutorial Best Paper Prize 2019

Summary: Misconduct (mis-selling and hidden fees etc.) in traditional banking sector drives borrowers to online lenders.

Conferences: EFA 2018, CEPR Third European Workshop on Household Finance, 4th IWH-FIN-FIRE Workshop in Halle

Teaching

2022 Evaluation: median = 5/5, mean = 4.9/5, N = 130

2023 Evaluation: median = 5/5, mean = 4.7/5, N = 70

Discussions