Jidi Cao

Bio

👋 Welcome! I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Finance at Sichuan University. I am on the 2026/2027 academic job market and available for interviews (My CV).

🌏 My research interests are corporate governance and sustainability, and I’m enthusiastic about large language models, text analysis, and agentic AI and their use in research (see my personal projects).

🇩🇪 I was sponsored by the China Scholarship Council (CSC) as a visiting Ph.D student in Finance at TUM School of Management, Technical University of Munich, Germany (2023–2024), under the supervision of Prof. Sebastian Müller, CFA.

🇫🇷 🇱🇺 Prior to conducting academic research, I earned a Master’s degree in Accounting and Finance from EDHEC Business School in France (2021), and worked as a financial analyst at PingPong Payment S.A. in Luxembourg (2021).

Research Interests

• Shareholder activism
• Corporate governance
• Sustainable finance and climate change

Working Papers

Silencing the Green Engine: How Shareholder Voice Suppresses Innovation (Job market paper)

Using a large language model to classify environmental shareholder proposals, we find that proposals advancing to a public vote significantly suppress green innovation. The decline is stronger with higher shareholder support and is consistent with a multitask framework in which shareholder pressure weakens incentives for long-horizon environmental investment. Evidence from environmental compensation, incident coverage, and proposal content further reveals how incentives shift. Nevertheless, activism promotes innovation when targeting environmentally deficient firms, during periods of high climate concern, or under institutional sponsorship. Our findings highlight the unintended friction of public ESG engagement in the absence of informed target selection and timing.

👉Fine-tuned LLM and trainingset used are available on Hugging Face

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Words of (No-) Action: Regulatory Discretion and Shareholder Voice (Work in progress)
With Christian Breitung and Sebastian Müller

Using the setting of SEC Rule 14a-8, we construct a dataset of over 5,300 SEC no-action letters that captures the complete life cycle of management-contested shareholder proposals. We study a selection problem in shareholder proposal disputes, examining the economic trade-offs underlying the SEC’s allocation of review effort under capacity constraints within the Rule 14a-8 regime. We develop a retrieval-based architecture and machine learning model to process unstructured correspondence in this multi-party bargaining setting of corporate governance. We aim to provide evidence on how SEC regulatory screening shapes shareholder “voice” and at what cost, with implications for the ongoing policy debate over Rule 14a-8.

Workshops and Conferences

• The 4th HKU Governance and Sustainability Conference, participant (October 23, 2026, Hong Kong, China)
• Workshop on Corporate Governance in the Era of Climate Change (Guest speaker: Roni Michaely, University of Hong Kong), Sichuan University, co-organizer (Est. 2026, Chengdu, China)
• Swedish House of Finance and ECGI Annual Conference on Corporate Governance, participant (August 27–28, 2024, Stockholm, Sweden)
• The 2nd European Sustainable Finance Ph.D. Workshop, participant (June 18–29, 2024, Augsburg, Germany)
• ESG Risk Management Framework for the Financial Sector, participant (May 29, 2024, Vienna, Austria)
• Workshop on Current Research Trends in Sustainable Finance, poster presenter (November 16–17, 2023, Heilbronn, Germany)