Ph.D. Program

Overview

The finance Ph.D. program seeks to train world class academic researchers. The program offers an in-depth learning environment, close student-faculty interaction, exposure to different areas in the field of finance, and access to state-of-the-art computer software and financial datasets. 

Students have leveraged the breadth of our faculty’s research interests to study questions in diverse research areas, including corporate finance, household finance, municipal financing, climate finance, corporate debt, fintech, stock markets, derivatives, and real estate finance.

Professor Jay Huang has been coordinator of the Finance Ph.D. Program since Fall 2025.

Spotlights

Alumni: Zihan Ye

Haslam College of Business
Google

Zihan Ye came to Penn State after earning her master’s degree from the University of Oxford and graduated from the doctoral program in Finance in 2020. She began her academic career as an Assistant Professor of Finance at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and joined the University of Tennessee’s Haslam College of Business in 2023. Zihan conducts empirical research in municipal finance, healthcare finance, and innovation, with a particular focus on how public policy, public health, and demographic change affect government financing costs and local economic outcomes. Her research has been published in the Review of Financial Studies and Management Science. Her current work examines the effects of reproductive healthcare policy on state and local governments’ borrowing costs, along with topics related to hospital risk, banking, migration, and innovation. Her research has been presented at leading conferences, including the American Finance Association, Finance Research Association, and American Economic Association meetings.

Current 5^th- and 6^th-Year Students

Golnaz Bahrami works at the intersection of climate finance, real estate, and corporate finance. Her paper with former Smeal PhD student Brian Gibbons, "Passive Debt Ownership and Corporate Financial Policy," was accepted at the Review of Finance this summer, showing that rising passive ownership of corporate debt leads firms to increase leverage and payouts as monitoring weakens. Her job market paper studies how extreme weather shocks affect household relocation and housing market reactions, and she has ongoing work with Matthew Gustafson and Eva Steiner on the land-market and homeowner investment effects of conservation easements, alongside projects on wildfire risk disclosure and the pricing of air pollution in municipal bond markets. She has presented at the American Economic Association meetings, the Baruch-JFQA Climate Finance and Sustainability Conference, the Boulder Summer Conference, the UT Dallas Fall Finance Conference, and the AREUEA National Conference, with coauthor presentations at the AFA and EFA. She has taught FIN 410 (Derivative Markets) as an instructor, refereed for the Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, and founded the Finance PhD Talk with Alumni seminar series at Smeal.

Yuchen Li is a Ph.D. candidate in Finance at the Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on municipal finance, higher education finance, corporate finance, and green innovation. His job market paper examines how online sports betting legalization affects state municipal borrowing costs. His current research also explores the effects of trade policy, demographic change, accounting standards, and place-based policies on financial markets and public institutions. In addition to his research, Yuchen has taught Personal Finance at Penn State and served as a teaching assistant for undergraduate and graduate finance courses. Before pursuing his Ph.D., he worked in financial analysis and risk management at Citibank and other financial institutions in the US.

Jewon Shin is entering his fifth year as a Finance Ph.D. candidate at Penn State. His research focuses on empirical corporate finance, particularly disclosure, ESG/CSR, corporate governance, and climate finance. Jewon’s work has been invited for presentation at several major conferences, including the China International Conference in Finance, Northern Finance Association, Eastern Finance Association, and Financial Management Association, and he has received multiple Best Paper Awards from the Asian FA, Southwestern Finance Association, and the Massey Sustainable Finance Conference. Jewon has already published in the Journal of Business Ethics, a journal listed among the Financial Times top 50 journals, during his PhD. Prior to joining Penn State, Jewon worked as a financial machine learning intern at a startup company in Korea and completed his M.Sc. in Finance and a double major in Business Administration (B.B.A.) and Applied Statistics (B.A.) at Yonsei University.

Wayne (Haowei) Yuan is a sixth-year finance doctoral student on the 2026–27 academic job market, seeking a tenure-track position at a research-focused university. His research primarily explores empirical asset pricing, focusing on equity mispricing, information frictions, and the information content of corporate disclosure. His job market paper, "Managerial Expected Growth and Value Premium," builds a firm-level measure of expected growth directly from managers' forward-looking statements in 10-K and 10-Q filings, and uses it to show that the return predictability of the market-to-book ratio reflects rational compensation for intangible growth-option risk rather than extrapolative mispricing. Wayne's work has been invited for presentation at several major conferences, including the American Finance Association PhD Poster Session, the Financial Management Association and its Doctoral Consortium, the Eastern Finance Association, and the International Behavioral Finance Conference. He has been recognized with the Robert and Kristen Strong Doctoral Award, an AFA Travel Grant, and a Smeal Small Research Grant, along with several graduate scholarships, and his coauthored work with Samuel Bonsall IV and Alexei Zhdanov on equity mispricing and credit rating accuracy is under revision at the Journal of Accounting and Economics, a journal listed among the UTD24 journal list. Prior to joining Penn State, Wayne completed his M.S. in Quantitative Finance at Fordham University and his B.S. in Applied Mathematics at Nankai University.

Devin Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate in Finance at the Smeal College of Business. His research asks how forces beyond the balance sheet, such as uncertainty from supply chains, politics, and environmental disclosure, shape corporate investment and financing. He also examines how private capital interacts with public finance within the U.S. infrastructure sector. Supported by multiple Smeal Research and Sustainability Grants, Devin has presented at the Financial Management Association and INFORMS Annual Meetings. Before his doctoral studies, he spent several years in management and technology consulting, advising automotive OEMs and suppliers on product planning and innovation. Additionally, he co-organizes the Inter-Finance PhD Seminar, a student-run virtual seminar connecting PhD students across schools.

Incoming Students (Fall 2026)

Aviv J. Alpern has a BS in Molecular & Cellular Biology with minors in Applied Math and Chinese from the University of Washington, and an MS in Applied Math and Statistics from Stony Brook University. Over the past few years, he has held positions in both the financial industry and a university research lab, with a focus on quantitative finance.

Ngoc Lan Luu holds a BS in Accounting and Auditing from Foreign Trade University in Hanoi, Vietnam. Her professional background includes experience at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Vietnam and the Vietnam Institute of Directors.

Recent Placements

The 2025–26 cycle

No students on the job market

The 2024–25 cycle

Qiang Wang (2025, University of Calgary)
Essays on Household Finance
Doctoral Committee: Jess Cornaggia (Chair), Charles Cao, Matthew Gustafson, Giang Bguyen

Jennifer Liang (2025, Idaho State)
Essays on Municipal Finance and Corporate Governance
Doctoral Committee: Peter Iliev (Chair), Kimberly Cornaggia, Matthew Gustafson