Research

From employee to entrepreneur: The role of unemployment risk

with Ai Jun Hou, Sara Jonsson, Xiaoyang Li

Journal of Financial Economics, 2025. [Link]

Key takeaways: Increased unemployment risk, instead of actual unemployment outcome, causally nudges employees into entrepreneurship. This nudge, however, is not associated with poor ex-post personal income or firm quality.

Media coverage: Swedish House of Finance Research in the Spotlight.

Presentations: AEA 2023 (poster), FIRN 2023, IFN Stockholm, Swedish House of Finance...

Effects of cultural origin on entrepreneurship

with Sara Jonsson

Journal of Economic Behaviour & Organization, 2023. [Link]

Key takeaways: Individuals with stronger cultural risk-taking appetite are more likely to become entrepreneurs, although with poorer firm performance after the transition.

The Fixed Disposition Effect [SSRN]

with Shumiao Ouyang 

Presentations: PhD Nordic Finance Workshop 2025 (scheduled), Experimental Finance 2025 (scheduled)

Abstract: We examine whether the disposition effect—a tendency to sell winners and hold losers—reflects stable investor traits or context-dependent behavior. Using investor-level data from a large-scale trading experiment and matched real-world fund transactions, we document consistent disposition tendencies across settings. We find that both realization preferences and belief-driven trading styles independently contribute to this bias. While nearly all investors show a baseline tendency to realize gains, contrarian investors—who anticipate mean reversion—exhibit significantly stronger disposition effects than momentum traders. A robust discontinuity in selling behavior around zero returns further supports the role of realization utility. By isolating and validating both mechanisms within and across contexts, our study reconciles competing explanations in the literature and reframes the disposition effect as a behavioral trait shaped by heterogeneous beliefs and broadly shared preferences. 

In and down: The Costs of Immigrant Investors 

[Preliminary draft available upon request]

Presentations: PhD Nordic Finance Workshop 2024, BFWG 2024, RBFC 2024

Abstract: This paper examines the portfolio diversification gap between immigrant and native-born investors using a comprehensive administrative dataset from Sweden. Leveraging a carefully matched investor sample, I document that immigrant investors incur a 37% higher return loss compared to natives, driven predominantly by underdiversification instead of high risky share. This gap persists even among second-generation immigrants, suggesting intergenerational disparities in wealth accumulation. I identify two key drivers: social integration and financial literacy. Immigrants with native-born partners or from countries with higher financial literacy levels experience lower return losses. However, merely extending the duration of stay in Sweden does not mitigate the gap. These findings highlight the need for policies that facilitate social integration and promote financial education to improve immigrants’ financial outcomes.

Experiment participation and belief formation 

with Shumiao Ouyang