About

Yuhai Xuan is Dean's Professor of Finance and Senior Associate Dean at The Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on empirical corporate finance, corporate governance, and behavioral finance. He has published extensively in leading academic journals in finance and his work has been covered by major media outlets including Bloomberg, The Economist, the Financial Times, Forbes, The New York Times, Reuters, and The Wall Street Journal. Professor Xuan has received numerous awards for his teaching, including the Excellence in Teaching Award at UC Irvine and the Dean's Impact Award for his leadership in the school's online MBA program. He previously served on the faculty of Harvard Business School and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds an AM and a PhD in Business Economics from Harvard University.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Business
• Finance
• Economics
• Monetary economics
• Financial system
• Labour economics
• Geography
• Demographic economics
• Accounting

Selected publications

• Hot under the Collar: Impacts of Extreme Heat on Financial Consumer Complaints

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: Do Banks Overreact to Disaster Risk?

  Harvard Dataverse · 2026-05-19

  datasetOpen access

  Replication package for "Do Banks Overreact to Disaster Risk? in 2025) (2026-04-6)

  PublisherDOI

• How Does Health Insurance Affect Firm Employment and Performance? Evidence from Obamacare

  Management Science · 2025-10-30

  articleSenior author

  This article discusses how mandating employers to provide health insurance of a minimum quality and the associated increases in health insurance premia affect firm employment and performance. Using firm-level employee health insurance data around the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), we show that the PPACA is associated with a significant increase in health insurance premia for employees in company-sponsored health insurance plans. In response, employers with greater exposure to the PPACA reduce employee enrollments in their health insurance plans to a larger extent after the law’s enactment. Our analysis suggests that employers achieve this reduction in enrollment by shifting employment composition from full-time employees to part-time, temporary, or seasonal workers, who are not covered in employer-sponsored health insurance plans. Furthermore, we find no evidence of deterioration in performance at companies more exposed to the increase in health insurance premia. Overall, our findings illustrate how firms adapt to and mitigate cost increases associated with regulatory changes through strategic labor practices. This paper was accepted by Lin William Cong, finance. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.03761 .

  PublisherDOI

• Do Professional Rankings Affect Analyst Behavior? Evidence From a Regression Discontinuity Design *

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Do Professional Rankings Affect Analyst Behavior? Evidence From a Regression Discontinuity Design

  Management Science · 2025-08-20

  articleSenior author

  This study examines how winning a significant industry award affects the behavior of finance professionals. Focusing on sell-side equity analysts and utilizing a novel data set from Institutional Investor on analyst rankings, we employ a regression discontinuity design that compares the postaward research outputs and behavior of third-place, all-star analysts with those of first runner-up analysts who barely miss the distinction. Our results show that third-place all-star winners are more optimistic in their forecasts and recommendations compared with first runner-up analysts after winning the award, and market reactions to their forecast revisions are stronger. The third-place winners also receive higher priority during earnings conference calls and experience better career outcomes. Our evidence is consistent with award-winning analysts leveraging their increased reputation and market influence to generate more trading commissions and career benefits. The broader inference of our findings is that finance professionals who win a significant award are likely to become more, rather than less, strategic. This paper was accepted by Kay Giesecke, finance. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.04249 .

  PublisherDOI

• Are Share Repurchases Really Flexible?

  Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis · 2025-03-28

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract This article documents a trend of declining flexibility in share repurchase policies over the last 4 decades. We show that repurchases have become particularly sticky for firms with repurchase programs in place. We also exploit the additional inflexibility within existing repurchase programs to show that repurchase stickiness can have real effects for firms. Using the 2008 financial crisis as a shock to firms’ ability to raise capital, we find that firms with ongoing share repurchase programs ending after Dec. 2007 reduced investment, employment, and R&D spending by more than similar firms with programs ending before the onset of the crisis.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Internet Appendix for Do Professional Rankings Affect Analyst Behavior? Evidence From a Regression Discontinuity Design

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Governance by One-Lot Shares

  Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis · 2024-11-25 · 14 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Abstract We use a novel experiment in China to examine the effects of having a quasi-official investor own a small number of shares on specific firm outcomes. We find that, relative to control firms, pilot firms experience an increase in dissenting votes from independent directors, a reduction in tunneling and earnings management activities, and an improvement in merger performance. Independent directors questioned by the quasi-official shareholder in activism events subsequently lose board seats in the director market. Overall, our results shed light on a new mechanism for enhancing the protection of minority shareholders.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Politically Affiliated Analysts

  Management Science · 2024-04-30 · 8 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Government ownership of financial intermediaries is pervasive around the world. In this study, we examine the impact of common government ownership between the brokerage and listed firms on the information production role of brokerage firms. We show that affiliated analysts tend to issue more optimistic recommendations for stocks of firms controlled by the same government entity that controls their brokerage firms. This optimistic bias is particularly pronounced during periods of economic shocks. Our study demonstrates this by utilizing additional tariff impositions and tariff exemptions during the U.S.–China trade war as exogenous negative and positive shocks, respectively. Additionally, our study indicates that stocks recommended by politically affiliated analysts tend to underperform those recommended by independent analysts, implying that the optimism stems from conflicts of interest rather than superior information. Furthermore, our research highlights that sophisticated investors perceive the potential bias and incorporate it into their trading. Consistent with an exchange of favors story, politically affiliated brokerage firms receive a larger allocation during the issuance of local government debt, whereas governments subscribe for more shares during seasoned equity offerings by these affiliated brokerage firms. This paper was accepted by Kay Giesecke, finance. Funding: The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 71972088, 72132002, and 71991473], the National Social Science Foundation of China [Grants 21ZDA010 and 22VRC145], and the Innovation and Talent Base for Digital Technology and Finance [Grant B21038]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.00579 .

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Local Environmental Beliefs and Corporate Environmental Performance

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Paul A. Gompers

  28 shared

• Chen Lin

  13 shared

• Yue Ma

  7 shared

• Paul Malatesta

  7 shared

• Vladimir Mukharlyamov

  Georgetown University

  6 shared

• Heitor Almeida

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  5 shared

• Ruidi Huang

  Southern Methodist University

  4 shared

• Hong Wu

  Fudan University

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• Jensen Prize (First Place Winner) for the best corporate fin…
• Excellence in Teaching Award at UC Irvine
• List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent and Best Professor awar…
• Harvard University Certificate of Distinction in Teaching
• Dean's Impact Award for leadership in the Illinois Online MB…