Muhan Hu is a fifth-year PhD candidate in the Department of Finance at the University of Melbourne. Her research interest is empirical corporate finance with a focus on corporate innovation and technology spillovers. Her studies seek to understand how corporate innovation and technology spillovers affect firms’ productivity, market value, and stock returns.
She is on the job market for 2022/2023 and will be available for interviews at FMA (Atlanta), ASSA (New Orleans), and remotely. Her CV can be accessed here.
Her job market paper investigates how competition affects the economic value of innovation, the primary incentive for corporate R&D investments. She measures the economic value of innovation based on the changes in patenting firms' stock market value around patent issuance dates, following Kogan et al. (2017). The economic value of innovation is higher in industries with a low level of competition. Within an industry, firms at the technological frontier or those that have relatively high pricing power enjoy higher economic returns from patents. She uses a quasi-natural experimental design to compare the value of patents issued immediately before and after competition-altering events. Using horizontal M&A announcements as anti-competitive events, she shows that an expected decrease in market competition leads to an increase in patent value.
For more information, please visit her personal website.