Professor Sheridan Titman

Professor in Finance and the Walter W. McAllister Centennial Chair in Financial Services, McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin

Bio:
Sheridan Titman holds the McAllister Centennial Chair in Financial Services at the University of Texas at Austin and is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Texas, he was a Professor at UCLA, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Boston College and spent the 1988-89 academic year in Washington D.C. as the special assistant to the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. His academic publications include both theoretical and empirical articles on asset pricing, corporate finance, and energy finance as well as real estate and urban economics. He won the Smith-Breeden best paper award for the Journal of Finance, the GSAM best paper award for the Review of Finance and was a recipient of the Batterymarch Fellowship. He has served on the editorial boards of leading academic journals, including the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies and Real Estate Economics, has served as President of the Western Finance Association the American Finance Association and the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association and has served as a Director of the American Finance Association, the Western Finance Association, the Financial Management Association and the Asia Pacific Finance Association. He has also co-authored three finance textbooks, Financial Markets and Corporate Strategy, Valuation: The Art and Science of Corporate Investment Decisions, and Financial Management: Principles and Applications.

Speech Title:
Geography, Real Estate and Value Creation

Abstract:
In this presentation, I will talk about real estate valuation, risk, and the extent to which geography contributes to firm value creation.  I will focus on four observations: 
1. One of the strongest predictors of CBD rents is the number of Bloomberg terminals in the city;
2. Value creation in the US is concentrated in a small number of 'glamour' cities;
3. The value of being in the right city increased in the 1990s;
4. High q cities tend to have high property values, but are not necessarily the fastest growing cities.

Professor Liyan Yang

Professor of Finance, Peter L. Mitchelson/SIT Investment Associates Foundation Chair in Investment Strategy, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

Bio:
Liyan Yang is a Professor of Finance and Peter L. Mitchelson/SIT Investment Associates Foundation Chair in Investment Strategy at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. In 2010, Professor Yang received his Ph.D. in economics at Cornell University. His research interests mainly focus on financial markets, asset pricing, and behavioral finance. He is currently serving as an associate editor at journals such as Journal of Finance, Journal of Economic Theory, and Management Science. He is a fellow of the Accounting and Economics Society and a fellow of Luohan Academy. He serves on the Governing Council of Society of Financial Studies (SFS) and on the Executive Committee of Conference on Financial Economics and Accounting (CFEA). Professor Yang's research has appeared in Journal of Economic Theory, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Finance, and Review of Financial Studies, etc. Yang has received the 2020 MFA Capital Markets and the Real Economy Award, the 2019 China International Forum on Finance and Policy Excellence Paper Award, the 2016 JFQA William F. Sharpe Award for Scholarship in Financial Research, the 2016 Bank of Canada's Governor's Award, and the 2015 Roger Martin Award for Excellence in Research, among others.

Speech Title:
Market Feedback: Evidence from the Horse's Mouth

Abstract:
We survey 3,626 Chinese public firms to examine the real consequences of financial markets. More than 90% of firms pay attention to the stock market, for the purposes of learning information from the market to guide real investment decisions and of accessing external financing. These findings provide direct evidence for the wide existence of market feedback effect via a learning channel and a financing channel. Firms are more likely to learn information when their stock prices contain more information produced by analysts, when managers are less informed, and when market participants have more private information. Firms are more likely to monitor the stock market for the financing reason when they are more financially constrained and when have larger capital needs. Our analysis thus provides substantial support for that financial markets are not only a side show, but instead, affect real economy.