Welcome to my website 👋

I am a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Finance at Deakin Business School. My research lies in a broad area of empirical corporate finance, with a focus on innovation, climate change, labor market, and machine learning and textual analysis.

Email: qiyang.he[at]deakin.edu.au

Curriculum Vitae: Click Here

SSRN Author Page: Click Here




What's New



Publications


  1. The Effect of Social Media on Corporate Innovation: Evidence from Seeking Alpha Coverage, 2025, Management Science, 71 (7), 5441-5476 [SSRN]
    • With Henry Leung, Buhui Qiu and Zhou Zhou
    • Short Summary: Social media coverage promotes corporate innovation by disseminating innovation-related information about the covered firm to external investors, thereby alleviating the firm's financial constraints.

  1. Environmental Enforcement Actions and Corporate Green Innovation, 2025, Journal of Corporate Finance, 91, 102711 [SSRN]
    • With Buhui Qiu
    • Short Summary: EPA enforcement actions cause reputational damage to the enforced firms, prompting them to develop more green patents. The positive effect is stronger when the reputational damage is more severe. Overall, the enforced firms use green patents as a costly but credible signal to the market for reputation remediation.
    • EPA formal enforcement case-gvkey linking table

Working Papers


  1. Firm-Level Labor-Shortage Exposure
    • With Jarrad Harford and Buhui Qiu
    • Selected Presentations: AFA 2025 Poster, FIRS 2024, NFA 2024^, CICF 2024, Australasian Finance and Banking Conference (AFBC) 2023, Sydney Banking and Financial Stability Conference (SBFC) 2023, Banking and Finance Forum at Macquarie University^
    • Short Summary: We use a large language model to develop a novel measure of labor-shortage exposure at the firm level. Firms with labor-shortage exposures experience lower earnings call CARs, future stock returns and operating performance. Firms respond to labor shortages by substituting labor with capital and R&D investments, and by producing more production-process patents.

  1. Greenwashing: Measurement and Implications
    • With Ben Marshall, Hung Nguyen, Nhut Nguyen, Buhui Qiu and Nuttawat Visaltanachoti
    • Selected Presentations: Canadian Sustainable Finance Network Conference 2025^, AEA 2025 Poster, SFS Cavalcade Asia-Pacific 2024^, UNPRI Academic Network Conference 2024^, GRASFI 2024, FMA Asia 2024^
    • Short Summary: We match corporate green talk identified by a large language model with actual environmental incidents from RepRisk to construct a comprehensive measure of firm-level greenwashing intensity. We find that managers engage in greenwashing to increase their job security and compensation, at the expense of shareholders and other stakeholders.

  1. The Value of Corporate Patent Utilization
    • With Jarrad Harford and Buhui Qiu
    • Selected Presentations: AFA Annual Meeting 2026 (scheduled), EFA Annual Meeting 2025 (scheduled), Monash Winter Finance Conference 2025 (scheduled)
    • Short Summary: We use textual analysis of firm patent and product filings to construct a novel measure of patent utilization rate. We find that new products supported by more patents receive higher announcement returns and are more likely to be breakthrough products. Firm-level patent utilization rate is positively associated with future new product development, market share growth, profitability, and firm valuation.

  1. Climate Regulatory Risks and Executive Compensation: Evidence from U.S. State-level SCAP Finalization
    • With Hung Nguyen, Buhui Qiu and Bohui Zhang
    • Selected Presentations: FMCG 2023, China Journal of Accounting Studies Conference 2023^

  1. Cap-and-Trade Policy and Energy-related Innovation: Evidence from the U.S. Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) Agreement
    • With Haekwon Lee and Buhui Qiu
    • Selected Presentations: FMA 2022

^: Presented by co-authors