The Linde Institute Awards Chen and Sui Graduate Fellowships

With the start of the new academic year, The Ronald and Maxine Linde Institute of Economic and Management Sciences announced its latest graduate fellowship recipients: Jun Chen and Pengfei Sui. They are both fifth-year PhD candidates in Caltech's social sciences program who will be on the job market in 2018.

Jun Chen's research interests lie in entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial finance. In his job market paper, Chen assembles the first systematic data on angel financing and finds the angel capital market to be quite large. His research also shows that angel financing leads to more venture capital (VC) follow-on financing, and that it can crowd out venture capital financing from initial stages. Chen's research demonstrates that angels play a critical role in financing early-stage firms.

Pengfei Sui's research interests include asset pricing and behavioral finance. In his current research project, he presents a dynamic equilibrium model of aggregate stock market sentiment in which investors form beliefs by overly extrapolating past returns. The key contribution is to bridge investor sentiment and mispricings by the market power of irrational investors and explain when mispricings will be corrected. In his research agenda, he also plans to investigate the perceived tail risks for investors in the stock market.