Manish Jha

Biography·Email|Curriculum Vitae.Google Scholar·SSRN

I am an Assistant Professor of Finance at Georgia State University. I hold a Ph.D. in Finance from Washington University and a Bachelor's degree in Technology from IIT Kanpur. Prior to my doctoral studies, I worked in sovereign bond research and options trading. I am deeply grateful for the support from Human Resource India, Kendriya Vidyalaya, MPS Foundation, and Super30. Feel free to reach out at mjha@gsu.edu or connect on LinkedIn and Twitter/X.

What's New? I will be attending the UConn Finance Conference in May and visiting Florida State University and the University of North Texas for fall seminars. Please feel free to reach out if you'd like to connect while I'm there.

Research

Interests: Artificial Intelligence, Corporate Governance, Financial Technology, Machine Learning, Text Analysis

Working & Revision Papers

No. 3

ChatGPT and Corporate Policies

with Jialin Qian, Michael Weber, and Baozhong Yang

arXiv NBER SSRN Becker Friedman Chicago Booth Review VoxEU

Revise and resubmit at Management Science.
Finalist, John L. Weinberg/IRRCi Best Paper Award 2024. Second Place, Dr. Richard A. Crowell Memorial Prize 2023.
ChatGPT could predict corporate policies, sometimes better than the market and forecasters.

No. 2

Generative AI, Managerial Expectations, and Economic Activity

with Jialin Qian, Michael Weber, and Baozhong Yang

arXiv SSRN Chicago Booth Review GSU News

We could use generative AI to predict economic indicators.

No. 1

ESG Metrics in Executive Compensation: a Multitasking Approach

with Vikas Agarwal, Juan Pedro Gomez, and Kasra Hosseini

SSRN IE Insights Promarket

Best Working Paper, IE University's Sustainability Research Award 2025.
ESG metrics in compensation contracts are accompanied with lower performance sensitivity for financial metrics.

Published & Accepted Papers

No. 5

The Politicization of Social Responsibility

with Todd Gormley and Meng Wang

NBER SSRN Harvard CorpGov Promarket VoxEU

Journal of Finance, Forthcoming.
Institutions' support for socially responsible proposals varies based on state politics.

No. 4

Does Finance Benefit Society? A Language Embedding Approach

with Hongyi Liu and Asaf Manela

RFS SSRN Data Bloomberg Promarket

Review of Financial Studies, Forthcoming.
Capitalist countries discuss finance in a more positive context.

Watch video

No. 3

A Shared Interest: Do Bonds Strengthen Equity Monitoring?

with Todd Gormley

JFQA NBER SSRN Columbia Law Blog Promarket

Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 2026.
Institutions monitor firms more when they hold firms' bonds.

No. 2

Do Activists Align with Larger Mutual Funds?

JBF arXiv SSRN Promarket

Journal of Banking and Finance, Volume 173, April 2025.
Activists discuss issues that align well with larger institutions.

No. 1

Natural Disaster Effects on Popular Sentiment Toward Finance

with Hongyi Liu and Asaf Manela

JFQA SSRN Bloomberg Washington Post

Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 56, No. 7, November 2021.
People have negative sentiment towards finance after uninsured disasters.

Teaching

Georgia State University

FI 8092: AI and Machine Learning Applications in Finance (2025–26)

FI 4020: Financial Analysis and Introduction to Loan Structuring (2021–25)

Washington University in St. Louis

Teaching Assistant — Empirical Methods in Finance (PhD Level, 2019)

Advanced Corporate Finance: Financing, Mergers and Acquisitions, Valuation (2017–21)

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

Resources

Data

Finance Sentiment Dataset — Sentiment toward finance in an annual panel spanning British English, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and US English from 1870 to 2009.