Feedback Pitching Documents 2021

Author

Stijn Masschelein

The feedback is not unrelated to your marks but the feedback goes broader than where you lost marks. I try to give feedback in a way that helps you to fulfill the main criteria of the rubric for the proposal and the thesis. See for instance here for the rubric.

Joshua Ong

  • The papers seem quite specific to the topic. I would like to see some more key papers with high quality empirical analysis of noise traders/retail trading/… or whatever you want to call it.
  • I am not really sure what discretionary liquidity is. From the data section I think you are measuring it by the influx of Robinhood investors. Does that mean that Robinhood investors are different from ordinary retail investors? Is discretionary liquity just an influx of retail investors?
  • What you call mispricing is measured by short interest. Why not just say that you study the effect of discretionary liquidity on short interest? In that case, you do not have to make the case that you are studying mispricing.
  • In general, I get the sense that you are well prepared in terms of the data but I am not really sure what the exact connection is between the research question and the tests you are proposing.

Ben Chamberlain

  • From the motivation and idea it is not clear why there is a connection between Twitter and professional publication sentiment and short interest. I am not saying that there is no possible connection but it is not well explained at this point. This makes it harder to evaluate whether your empirical approach can answer your question.
  • Do you expect that sentiment is/can be different for Twitter versus professional publications?
  • I assume that you are using sentiment measures for each company and not a market measure. It’s not entirely clear from the data section. Also make sure that you know what the weaknesses are of sentiment measurs if you are not constructing them yourself.
  • In general, I get the sense that you are well prepared in terms of the data but I am not really sure what the exact connection is between the research question and the tests you are proposing.

Liwei Liu

  • It took me almost untill the end of the pitch to understand what you mean by the social-distancing resilience effect. I think it means that people might get distracted from the importance of climate change during the Covid pandemic. Make sure you explain this earlier in the proposal. (Definitely if I am wrong!).
  • Covid can be a shock for many things. I think you can use it here but think hard about alternative explanations.

Alasdair Philip

  • In the key papers, I would like to see more papers on the value of certain unusual asset classes, e.g. gold.
  • If I understand it correctly, the study aims to investigate whether the parody coins have any “fundamental” value beyond as an opportunity for speculation. I think a more conceptual discussion in the proposal would be useful. For instance, is the value of the coins that they provide some form of liquidity that other coins not have, are they relatively uncorrelated with other asset classes. Can you separate these effects from Bitcoin. At this point, I feel like I have to puzzle together how the different measures connect to the underlying research question.
  • Sentences like “no purpose in the correlational sense” are not clear.

Christian Harding

  • The story is clear. I think it’s going to be hard to distinguish empirically the effect of the CEO on the company and companies with an environmental culture attracting certain CEOs. This is fine. You just need to be aware of it when you discuss your results.
  • It’s not really clear to me how you are measuring the environmental consciousness of the CEO. It assume you do it based on ancestry but that is still a leap.
  • Sidenote: the point of a simulation is not to accurately predict the real data. The point is that if you cannot simulate the data, you do not understand your theory well enough.

Nafe Hamid

  • Explain what Key Audit Matters are and what their relevance is to the literature or the underlying research question. Why should other auditing researchers care about the concept of Key Audit Matters?
  • What do you mean by similarity in KAM disclosure? Similarity of disclosures between the disclosurs of the same firm over time? Within the same year? Between firms in the same industry? Why is the similarity important to investigate as opposed to for instance the quantity or quality of disclosure? I don’t think quantity for instance is better, you just don’t make an argument for similarity as an important measure.
  • Similarly, why does it matter whether differences can be explained by auditor or client factors?

Jun Heng Chou

  • In the research question, you imply that there is a correct way of accounting for crypto assets. It would be good if you could dive more in the underlying assumption of what correct means. According to existing standards? With the goal to increase transparency? With the goal to value the assets? This might also be important because your interviewees might have different assumptions about what correct means.
  • In your key papers, it would be good to include other studies that investigated the opinion of market participants about the correct accounting method. You probably will not find any papers for crypto assets but it could be for other assets.

Yuyang Zhou

  • Define UMP? Do you focus on all aspects of UMP or only a subset? Do you focus on asset purchases, forward guidance, negative rates? They might have different effects, they might work together. I think you need to be more precise about what your cause is doing.
  • For the hypothese. Why are you comparing industries and not firms? Why do you group lower and stable leverage together? Is it possible for industries to have high but stable leverage? Does this matter?
  • To what extent do you need to take into account cross border effects and real economy effects. Eg. multinationals might be more impacted by the FED than by the central bank of their host country. Also do you need think more about how smaller central banks react to the FED? Do you need to take into account economic effects of interest rate policy? For instance in Australia, interest rate policy has an impact on mortgages which has an impact on the construction sector.

Sherin Babu

  • In Motivation: I am not sure with the arguments around financial literacy. If you ar financial literate and you believe that BNPL platforms earn mony because of late payments, you can avoid to have any late payments. I am sure that there is an interesting question there but you have to be more precise in your arguments.
  • The writing could be improved in places. Make sure that you spend enough time on improving your drafts for the proposal and the thesis.

Alain Noel

  • I like the research question.
  • How is your paper different from the first paper in the key papers? It’s fine if you do something similar but it would be good to explain how your study is related to this paper.
  • I do not fully understand how your study can challenge current capital structure theories. You first need to explain those theories.
  • Idea: When you say that firms are going to take less risk with more concentration, you need to take into account that firms that are happy to take on more risk, might be happier to have only a limited number of customers. With panel data and smart research designs, you might be able to disentangle those effects but you need to be aware of them.
  • What is the instrumental variable? Not discussing the instrumental variable is like not explaining how you are going to measure concentration.
  • I would like to see more discussion about what you mean by compensation. Do you mean overall compensation, bonus payments, share holdings, incentives for risk taking?

Thomas Higgins

  • The first paper seems to be very similar to what you want to do. Make sure that you can distinguish what you do or explain why you do something similar. Related: It is not 100% clear whether wind power is expected to have an effect on gas prices, the other way around, or both.
  • I was not clear on why you need to use autoregressive models but that could be because the exact research question is not clear.
  • Is there a specific reason why you focus on wind and not solar? A bit more detail on the renewables and the institutional details of the electricity market could be helpful here.