Manish Jha

35 Broad St (1241); Atlanta, GA 30303 · mjha@gsu.edu

Hi, I am an Assistant Professor of Finance at Georgia State University. My areas of expertise include corporate finance, financial technology, and machine learning. I share my research work on Google Scholar, NBER, ProMarket, SSRN, and VoxEU.

I received a PhD in Finance from Washington University and a Bachelor's in Technology from IIT Kanpur. Between the two degrees, I worked in sovereign bond research and options trading. Feel free to email me about anything at mjha@gsu.edu. You can check out my Curriculum Vitae, or reach around the web on GitHub, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Research

Research Interests

Corporate Governance, Financial Technology, Machine Learning, Text Analysis

Forthcoming/ Published Papers

1. Natural Disaster Effects on Popular Sentiment Toward Finance

with Hongyi Liu and Asaf Manela JFQA, SSRN, Video | Bloomberg Opinion (ungated), Washington Post
Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 2021

We use a text-based measure of popular sentiment toward finance to study how finance sentiment responds to rare historical disasters and to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Working Papers

2. Do Activists Align with Larger Mutual Funds?

SSRN, Slides, Video | Chicago Booth Promarket

I find that activists align proxy communications with the preferences of fund families that own a larger share in targeted firms.

3. Does Finance Benefit Society? A Language Embedding Approach

with Hongyi Liu and Asaf Manela SSRN, Slides, Video | Chicago Booth Promarket

We measure popular sentiment toward finance using a computational linguistics approach applied to millions of books published in eight countries over hundreds of years.

4. A Shared Interest: Do Bonds Strengthen Equity Monitoring?

with Todd Gormley SSRN | Chicago Booth Promarket, Columbia Law School Blog, European CorpGov Institute

We document that institutions conduct more governance research and are less likely to follow proxy advisor recommendations for companies whose bonds represent a larger proportion of their portfolio.

5. ChatGPT and Corporate Policies

with Jialin Qian, Michael Weber, and Baozhong Yang NBER, SSRN, Video | Becker Friedman Institute, Business Wire, CFO.com, CEPR VoxEU, Harvard CorpGov Forum

We use ChatGPT to create an investment score based on conference call texts. The score forecasts corporate investment and expected returns, controlling for Tobin's q and other predictors.

6. The Politicization of Social Responsibility

with Todd Gormley and Meng Wang SSRN

Institutional investors are less likely to support socially responsible investment proposals for firms in states with Republican governors.

Teaching

Georgia State University

FI 4020: Financial Analysis and Introduction to Loan Structuring (2021-2023)

Washington University in St Louis

Teaching Assistant

Empirical Methods in Finance (PhD Level, 2019)

Advanced Corporate Finance: Financing, Mergers and Acquisitions, Valuation (2017–2021)

Asset Pricing: Investment Theory, Options & Futures (2017)

Volunteer Tutor

Each One Teach One, St. Louis Elementary School (2018)

HSBC Financial Skills Exchange Program, Bangalore (2016)

Codes

Natural Language Processing

Python codes for Latent Dirichlet Analysis (LDA), Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP), and Word2Vec.

Working with SEC and WRDS

Interact with SEC Filings: work with filings from SEC's EDGAR system.

Interact with WRDS: download data from WRDS including CRSP, Compustat, ExecuComp, Linking Tables.

Other Codes

Maximize distance between students: code to seat students in a classroom to reduce covid spread.

Latex: code to change colors automatically in latex documents.

Stata: worked out example for mahapick, mahaselectunique.

Interests

I love to be active, go out, and paint. These days, I am learning to drive and aspiring to be a good chef. I follow comics-based shows and explore advancements in natural language processing. I am thankful to Super30, Kendriya Vidyalaya, MPS Foundation, and Human Resource India, for all the help. In my free time, I hike around Atlanta and go fishing.

Resources

Text Data in Finance - slides from a three hour PhD class.

Finance JM Advice - presentation for PhD students, explaining 2020 finance job market experience.

Business PhD Admissions - explains the admission process for prospective students.

Procurement Basics - basics of refinery equipment procurement.