About

Yihui Pan is an Associate Professor of Finance at the David Eccles School of Business, University of Utah. His research focuses on corporate finance, industrial organization, and labor economics, with a particular interest in understanding the strategic decisions of firms and the impact of these decisions on labor markets.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Finance
• Business
• Financial economics
• Economics
• Commerce
• Accounting
• Marketing
• Monetary economics
• Geography
• Labour economics

Selected publications

• Racial Disparities in Financial Complaints and the Role of Corporate Social Attitudes

  Journal of Accounting Research · 2025-03-17 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  ABSTRACT Using consumer complaints filed with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as a measure for the quality of financial products and services, we present evidence of racial disparities in the service quality received by consumers. Consumers in high‐minority communities file more complaints than those in low‐minority communities, and the racial gap in financial complaints increased by more than 60% during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Using a triple‐difference approach, we establish the role of corporate social attitudes, reflected in, for example, inclusive promotion practices and diversity in leadership, in mitigating the complaint racial gap and its pandemic‐period increase. Our results shed light on how inclusive corporate culture filters through an organization to benefit minority communities and underscore the effect of corporate social attitudes on important stakeholder outcomes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Political Attitudes and Equity Market Reactions to Vaccine Mandate Bans

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Ancestral connections and corporate alliances

  Journal of Corporate Finance · 2023-07-07 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper studies how culture works as an implicit incentive alignment mechanism in corporate alliances. We measure the ancestral connection between different corporate headquarters places, using historical immigration from different countries to different areas of the U. S. When forming business alliances, the ancestral composition of the area where firms locate plays an important role in their choices of partners and the location of new ventures. Exploiting immigration to U.S. cities induced by WWI and the immigration acts of the 1920s, we find that ancestral connection driven by the supply-push component of historical immigrant inflows is associated with an increase in alliance intensity today. Finally, partnering firms experience significantly better performance when the ancestral connection between their headquarters or between their inventors is stronger. Shared values and beliefs between firms' key stakeholders likely underlie the role of ancestral connection.

  PublisherDOI

• Political Divide and the Composition of Households’ Equity Portfolios

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023 · 14 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Economics
  • Political Science
  PublisherDOI

• Do Equity Markets Care <b>about Income Inequality? Evidence from Pay Ratio Disclosure</b>

  The Journal of Finance · 2022 · 125 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Monetary economics
  • Economics
  • Labour economics

  ABSTRACT We examine equity markets’ reaction to the first‐time disclosure of the CEO‐worker pay ratio by U.S. public companies in 2018. We find that firms disclosing higher pay ratios experience significantly lower abnormal announcement returns. Firms whose shareholders are more inequality‐averse experience a more negative market response to high pay ratios. Furthermore, during 2018 more inequality‐averse investors rebalance their portfolios away from stocks with a high pay ratio relative to other investors. Our results suggest that equity markets are concerned about high within‐firm pay dispersion, and investors’ inequality aversion is a channel through which high pay ratios negatively affect firm value.

  PublisherDOI

• The Eco-Gender Gap in Boardrooms

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 12 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• COVID Racial Disparities in Financial Complaints and the Role of Corporate Social Attitudes

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Voice of the Customers: Local Trust Culture and Consumer Complaints to the CFPB

  Journal of Accounting Research · 2021 · 64 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Business
  • Marketing
  • Accounting

  ABSTRACT We use complaints filed with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to study the interplay between social norms and the effectiveness of consumer protection laws. We find that a higher level of trust in a given location is associated with a lower number of complaints filed against financial institutions in that location. Employing a difference‐in‐differences approach, we further find that, after the establishment of the CFPB, banks in low‐trust areas reduce fees charged to consumers more compared to banks in high‐trust areas. Our results suggest that the threat of consumer complaints to a government agency affects how banks treat their customers, and they shed light on the interaction between informal culture and formal institutions, as well as on stakeholders’ influence in corporate policies.

  PublisherDOI
• RETRACTED

  RETRACTED: Research on the Development Quality of College Student Party Members Based on the Internet Environment

  Journal of Physics Conference Series · 2021-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract With the wide popularization of computer network at any time, students’ computer technology operation level has been greatly improved than before, and students have more channels to obtain information. In the Internet environment, the development of high-quality student party members is an extremely important work for the party’s construction, and has practical significance for the realization of the two centenary goals and the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

  PublisherDOI

• Equity Market Reaction to Pay Dispersion and Shareholders’ Prosocial Preferences

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Tracy Yue Wang

  University of Minnesota

  64 shared

• Michael S. Weisbach

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  54 shared

• Stephan Siegel

  11 shared

• Rachel M. Hayes

  3 shared

• Feng Jiang

  University of British Columbia

  3 shared

• Elena Pikulina

  University of British Columbia

  3 shared

• Po-Hsuan Hsu

  National University of Singapore

  2 shared

• Kai Li

  Northwest University

  2 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Statistics

  University of California, Berkeley

  2008

• M.S., Statistics

  University of California, Berkeley

  2005

• B.S., Mathematics

  University of Science and Technology of China

  2003

Awards & honors

• Best Paper Award, China International Finance Conference, 20…
• David Eccles Emerging Scholar Award, 2016
• Risk Institute Research Grant, Ohio State University, 2016
• Shmuel Kandel Award, Utah Winter Finance Conference, 2011