Welcome! I am a Senior Research Fellow at the UCL School of Management, and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Finance at the UCL Department of Economics. Before this, I worked as an Assistant Professor of Finance at Tsinghua University. I am a member of the Finance Theory Group. I received my PhD in Finance from the London School of Economics.
My research interests are Corporate Finance and Microeconomic Theory.
I am on the 2026-7 academic job market.
Email: yue.yuan [at] ucl.ac.uk
(Non-)Binding Shareholder Voting and Trading, with Markus Parlasca and Paul Voss (job market paper, draft coming soon)
We study whether binding or non-binding voting leads to higher expected firm value when shareholders with dispersed information can trade before voting. Non-binding voting allows the board to combine information from votes and share prices. Holding trading strategies fixed, this yields an advantage. However, it also gives shareholders stronger incentives to take net short positions while retaining their voting rights. Their distorted voting makes votes less informative. In our model, this incentive effect dominates the direct informational advantage, so binding voting leads to higher expected firm value.
Presentations: St. Gallen Financial Economics Workshop
Security Design under Two-Sided Asymmetric Information [SSRN]
When both the entrepreneur and investors have dispersed private information, the entrepreneur's choice of security family for a security-bid auction potentially affects both investors' beliefs and their information rents. At fixed beliefs, flatter families reduce investor rents and raise entrepreneur revenue averaged over the types in the beliefs. We identify a condition under which all entrepreneur types pool, namely, when the available security families are ordered by global steepness, a stronger condition than steepness. If a globally flattest family is available, D1 selects pooling on that family as the unique outcome. However, steepness alone does not imply pooling. We construct a separating equilibrium in which a high type chooses equity and a low type chooses debt.
Presentations: FIRS, EEA-ESWM
Share Issues versus Share Repurchases, with Philip Bond and Hongda Zhong [SSRN]
Management Science, forthcoming
In a unified framework of share issuances and repurchases, firms' asymmetric choices of transaction methods in issuances and repurchases and the size-method relation in issuances are natural outcomes of an informational friction.
Security Design under Common-Value Competition [SSRN]
Econometrica, 94(5), 1717-1759, 2026
When bidders with dispersed information compete for a common-value investment opportunity, they offer debt financing due to the winner's curse effect and the entrepreneur's informed-selection effect. These effects dominate the signaling effect.
Best Paper in Finance Theory on the Job Market awarded by FTG
WFA PhD Candidate Award for Outstanding Research
Lecturer, UCL
Corporate Issuers and Equity Valuation (master's, 2025)
Corporate Finance (master's, 2023-24)
Lecturer, Tsinghua University
Advanced Theories of Corporate Finance (PhD, 2021-22)
Teaching Assistant, LSE, 2016-21
FM212 Principles of Finance (undergraduate)
FM409 Risk Management in Financial Markets (master's)
FM430 Asset Markets (master's)
FM441 Derivatives (master's)
FM473 Financial Markets (master's)
Teaching Assistant, LSE Summer School, 2016-18
FM230 Alternative Investments
FM250 Finance
FM350 Advanced Corporate Finance
FN209 Corporate Finance in a Global World