Zhuolu Gao Wins Prestigious Award at Western Finance Association Annual Meeting
Zhuolu Gao has been awarded one of The Brattle Group Ph.D. Candidate Awards at this year’s Western Finance Association (WFA) Annual Meeting.
Congratulations to Zhuolu on this well-deserved recognition!
Zhuolu Gao, PhD student at Center for Big Data in Finance, received the award for her paper “Why Do Firms Pay More for Bank Loans? The Role of Renegotiation,” which was recognized as outstanding Ph.D.-level research in the field of corporate finance.
The paper examines why firms borrowing from both banks and the corporate bond market pay a substantial premium on bank loans and argues that a large portion of this premium compensates banks for facilitating out-of-court restructurings.
For the empirical analysis, the paper uses a 2014 U.S. court ruling, which impeded out-of-court restructurings, as a natural experiment.