Sara Xiaoya Ding
Colleagues:
Sara Xiaoya Ding will join our finance faculty as an assistant professor this fall and what a great addition she will be. Sara is completing her Ph.D. at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario (Canada) and has developed research and teaching interests in international and corporate finance, institutional investors and corporate governance. She is an empirical researcher, analyzing data to see if either theories or commonly accepted explanations for financial phenomena are supported or not. Her work spans U.S. and Chinese markets.
Sara's co-authored working paper "Local and Foreign Institutional Ownership, Information Asymmetries, and State Ownership" examines evidence in the debate over whether local investors have an advantage over foreign investors. She finds that Chinese investors may have an advantage in investing in Chinese State Owned Enterprises. Institutional investors from outside China may do better than local investors in Chinese firms that have no government ownership. She further finds that foreign investors can do as well as local investors on State Owned Enterprises that have better corporate governance. This paper won the "Best Paper Award" at the Asian Finance Association 2010 International Conference. Hong Kong's CFA association invited her to present the paper, which was also presented at three additional conferences in 2010: Financial Management Association (FMA), Northern Finance Association, and Southern Finance Association. Sara also has two working papers that examine the influences of housing price appreciation on corporate payout policy and cost of equity in the U.S.
Sara has taught an undergraduate course in finance and served as a teaching assistant in both undergraduate and MBA courses in corporate valuation, financial management, and international business as well as in investment and portfolio management. As a research assistant, she worked on asset pricing, portfolio strategy and cross border mergers and acquisitions.
Sara graduated from Nankai University (China) with bachelor's and master's degrees in finance. She earned an M.A. in Economics from the University of Guelph (Canada) before starting her Ph. D. studies at Queen's. Throughout her studies, Sara has excelled, winning at least 8 different scholarships or fellowships. As a result of her outstanding undergraduate performance, she was granted an exemption from China's national graduate entrance examination.
Please join me in welcoming Sara to our faculty. She can be reached at
xding@business.queensu.ca Mike
