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 finance 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 fine-tuned large language model, we demonstrate that environmental shareholder activism escalated to a public proxy vote significantly suppresses corporate green innovation. This unintended decline is driven by agency frictions, specifically the decoupling of environmental incentives and managerial distraction caused by subsequent reputational crises. The suppressive effect is concentrated among targets of disclosure-oriented proposals and firms with short innovation cycles. However, this effect reverses for environmental laggards and during periods of heightened climate concern. Overall, our findings suggest that environmental shareholder voice has real effects that depend critically on whether activism remains private or escalates to a public vote. We also reveal a critical tension in ESG governance and suggest that socially suboptimal underinvestment desire better design and coordination of interventions.

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

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Words of (No-) Action: Regulatory Discretion, and Governance Frictions (Work in progress)
With Christian Breitung, and Sebastian Müller

This project employs OCR tools to construct a novel dataset of over 5,300 SEC no-action letters, focusing on the full life cycle of management-contested shareholder proposals. Leveraging LLM-based reasoning and natural language processing, we capture sentiments, legal grounds, and information in the correspondence between proposing shareholders, management, and the SEC staff.

Workshops and Conferences

• Workshop on Corporate Governance in the Era of Climate Change (Guest speaker: Roni Michaely, University of Hong Kong), Sichuan University, co-organizer (Est. April 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)