Haoyi (Leslie) Luo is a final year PhD candidate of Finance. Her research interests cover the mutual fund industry in both the US market and the emerging markets, securities lending, and corporate governance. Her paper, "Like A Duck to Water: Do Credit Rating Analysts Outperform in Bond Fund Management?", was awarded the best paper of the RoZetta Institute (SIRCA) Research Prize in the 34th Australasian Finance and Banking Conference 2021 and currently under revision & resubmission with Journal of Corporate Finance. She has a paper published on Accounting and Finance. Haoyi is currently studying the impact of institutional ownership on equity capital raising of corporate firms. Haoyi graduated from Renmin University of China with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree (both in economics). She also obtained a master’s degree in economics from Kyushu University.
Job market paper
Investing while lending: Do index funds improve managerial information disclosures?
Securities lending activities have become pervasive among index funds in recent decades, yet its impact on corporate governance remains unclear. In this paper, I jointly investigate the corporate governance impact of both investing and lending activities of index funds, using a sample of the U.S. firms for 2002-2017. On the one hand, I document that securities lending deteriorates the information environment of public firms. On the other hand, index fund holdings are associated with more information transparency and less bad news hoarding by firm managers, after controlling for the opposing effects from securities lending. This finding survives a battery of robustness tests and is more pronounced in a small sample using the Russell 1000/2000 index reconstitution as a source of plausibly exogenous variation in index fund holdings. I also document a negative association between index ownership and abnormal trading activities around stock price crash weeks. My findings support the view that regardless of their pervasive securities lending engagement and passive investing strategies, index funds impose an overall favourable impact on the information environment of public firms.