Job Market Paper
Using conference call transcripts and contemporaneous press releases for the same quarterly earnings announcement, I document that inconsistent managerial tone across these communication channels predicts future negative abnormal returns, delays the market price response to earnings disclosures, and is robustly associated with subsequent fundamental adverse changes in firm performance and profitability. I further find that these inconsistencies foster market ambiguity, the mechanism that appears to be responsible for the delay of investor responses. This delayed price decline facilitates strategic and opportunistic insider trading, as insiders appear to capitalize on the mispricing stemming from the heightened disclosure processing costs imposed on investors. Overall, the evidence aligns with managers strategically employing mixed messaging in financial disclosures to mislead investors about underlying firm fundamentals by manipulating market perceptions and exploiting informational frictions induced by ambiguity.
Presentations:
American Finance Association (AFA) PhD Poster Session, 2026
Financial Management Association (FMA) Annual Meeting, Session: Consequences of Strategic Communications, 2025
Rady School of Management, UC San Diego, 2025
Schulich School of Business, York University, 2025
Travel Grants:
American Finance Association (AFA)
Schulich PhD Conference Fund
YUGSA Conference Support Fund
Working Paper
The Green Side of the China Shock: Environmental Responses of U.S. Firms to Import Competition
with Phuong-Anh Nguyen, Ambrus Kecskés, Ali Ahmadi, and Rui Duan.
We examine the environmental response of U.S. manufacturing firms to import competition. Motivated by the debate over whether firms “fight” (innovate) or “flee” (offshore) when faced with such shocks, this preliminary study merges several large-scale datasets to isolate the causal effect. We combine granular data on toxic chemical releases from the EPA's Toxics Release Inventory, spanning over three decades from 1991 to 2022, with product-level trade data from UN Comtrade, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) patent database, and MSCI KLD environmental performance data. Applying the canonical instrumental variable strategy from the trade literature to this multi-layered dataset, we find robust causal evidence that firms, on average, choose to “fight” by becoming cleaner, a strategy consistent with an “escape competition” approach through green differentiation. The paper identifies a firm’s pre-existing environmental record as the mechanism driving strategic greening. In particular, firms with lower pollution emissions or higher levels of green innovation exhibit superior performance when confronted with competitive shocks, making them more resilient. We further identify the specific innovation mechanism behind this resilience. Using U.S. patent citations, we classify innovation as exploitative when a new patent primarily cites a firm’s own prior work, and exploratory when it cites external knowledge. We show that, when exposed to competition shocks, firms with a history of green patents emphasize exploitative innovation—leveraging their existing green technologies rather than engaging in costly exploratory innovation. This strategic focus enhances differentiation at both the product and firm levels, fostering stronger customer loyalty. As a result, these firms maintain more stable sales and profits under heightened competition, ultimately achieving superior financial performance: preserving market value, safeguarding R&D, and being viewed as less risky. Overall, the paper highlights environmental performance as a key dimension of competitive resilience in a globalized market.
Work in Progress
Echoes in the Messages: Managerial Narrative Alignment with Market Discourse and Capital Market Consequences
Presentations:
Financial Management Association (FMA) Annual Meeting, Session: New Ideas in Fintech, 2025
Pre-Doctoral Publication
Individual Investors’ Intensive Trading and Stock Returns: Evidence from Tehran Stock Exchange TSE
with Ali Ebrahimnejad, and Masoud Talebian
Journal of Asset Management and Financing, April 2021