Simulating Public Opinion with Large Language Models: An Evidence-Based Exploration
As a new medium of communication, large language models (LLMs) learn values and attitudes from human-generated data, giving them the potential to capture and reflect public opinion. This talk will examine the capacity of LLMs to simulate public opinion from two perspectives. First, we will investigate the extent to which LLMs can represent public opinion across different nations and social groups, ...
Baohua Zhou, Fudan University
Wednesday, June 25, 2025 | 10:30am - 12:00pm | Room 333
More Details
Market Risk Premium: Optimal Predictive Factor in High Dimension
As numerous economic forces influence the stock market, we propose the Optimal Linear Factor (OLF) for predicting the market risk premium to capture the effects of a large set of predictors through a linear combination. OLF possesses the oracle property, performing as if the true combination coefficients were known asymptotically. Theoretically superior to existing methods and empirically consistent ...
Fuwei Jiang, Xiamen University
Wednesday, June 25, 2025 | 2:00pm - 3:30pm | Room 339
More Details
Reimagining Visual Science Communication in the Age of AI
Visuals are critical tools in science communication, yet traditional scientific images often prioritize data and aesthetics over clarity and public engagement. With the rise of AI-generated images, we face new questions about credibility and audience trust. This talk explores how visual strategies can evolve to better connect with the public, especially in complex or contested areas of science. Drawing ...
Nan Li, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Monday, June 23, 2025 | 2:00pm - 3:30pm | Room 333
More Details
When Bartik IV Meets Topic Model: A Principled Approach to Causal Inference with Unstructured Data
There is growing interest in estimating the causal effect of unstructured media content on business and consumer outcomes (e.g., new product adoption, market sales, brand affinity, investments). A common challenge is that the driver (that is, the volume of media content) is likely endogenous to the outcome of interest, such that directly regressing the outcome on the driver may yield biased estimates ...
Tong Guo, Duke University
Wednesday, June 18, 2025 | 10:30am - 12:00pm | Room 335
More Details
Political Attitudes and Equity Market Reactions to Vaccine Mandate Bans
We study equity market reactions to states laws banning COVID-19 vaccine mandates and find a 0.64% increase in abnormal returns to affected firms around law passage, compared to unaffected firms. The positive market reaction concentrates in firms with a Republican workforce, especially if they face tight local labor markets or have Democratic leadership. Firms with a Democratic workforce experience ...
Yihui Pan, University of Utah
Wednesday, June 18, 2025 | 3:00pm - 4:30pm | Room 339
More Details
Corporate Finance Through Loyalty Programs
Loyalty programs (LPs) are widely prevalent in practice and typically analyzed in economic research for their role in boosting business. This paper uncovers a novel finance role of LPs. We document stylized facts about LPs in travel industries, which lend support to this role. We build a dynamic model of LP financing, which features convenient rewards that give consumers flexibility in redeeming rewards....
Dan Luo, CUHK
Wednesday, June 18, 2025 | 10:30am - 12:00pm | Room 337
More Details
Digital Ecosystems and Data Regulation
This paper provides a framework in which a multiproduct ecosystem competes with many single-product firms in both price and innovation. The ecosystem is able to use data collected on one product to improve the quality of its other products. The framework is used to evaluate the impact of three data policies on pricing, innovation, and consumer welfare: restricting cross-product data usage within the ...
Junjie Zhou, Tsinghua University
Thursday, June 12, 2025 | 3:00pm - 4:30pm | Room 337
More Details
Indebted Supply and Monetary Policy: A Theory of Financial Dominance
We develop a New Keynesian model with financial frictions to explore the concept of “financial dominance” in monetary policy. Our theory is based on how the path of interest rates affects firms' ex-ante capital structure decisions and ex-post financial constraints. Ex ante, firms have a “market timing” motive to exploit differences between the cost of debt and equity, leading to increased leverage ...
Olivier Wang, New York University
Wednesday, June 11, 2025 | 10:00am - 11:30am | Room 337
More Details
Factors Affecting Perception of AI Communicators
AI communicators will soon be a big part of our lives. This talk focuses who who they are, what can they do, and more importantly, how we do look at them. We identify factors that affect our perception of AI communicators, and will use an experiment to illustrate how audience perceived AI anchors. AI communicators that they implication on communication, on being human and on life are discussed.
Shuhua Zhou, CityUHK
Wednesday, June 4, 2025 | 10:30am - 12:00pm | Room 333
More Details
