Jennifer M. Walsh

Jennifer M. Walsh

I am a Ph.D. student in Business Economics at Harvard, where I was supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and am affiliated with the Center for American Political Studies. My research fields are industrial organization and financial economics.

I am on the 2026-2027 job market.

I graduated from Harvard with an A.B. in Physics & Mathematics. Before starting my Ph.D., I was a management consultant at Bain & Company.

Job Market Paper

  1. Capital Regulation as a Barrier to Bank Consolidation (with Nathan Kaplan) [Draft coming soon!]

Working Papers

  1. How Do Nonprofits Use Cash Windfalls? Evidence from $5B in Unrestricted Donations [SSRN] Updated

    I use $5B of MacKenzie Scott's unrestricted gifts as a natural experiment to test the hypothesis of a “nonprofit starvation cycle” caused by donation use-restrictions. Comparing 643 recipients to similar nonrecipients with difference-in-differences, I find that recipients attracted additional donations, spent the entire gift within two years, and disbursed 20% of new spending as grants to others and 3% as executive compensation. In present value, $0.18 per dollar of the windfall was spent on executive pay. With a corporate-finance model of nonprofits maximizing charitable output subject to donation use-restrictions, the evidence casts doubt on the starvation cycle hypothesis.

  2. Quantifying Investor Pressure (with Sarah Robinson) [SSRN]

    How do investor preferences translate to changes in firm actions? We develop a firm-, time-, and topic-specific measure of investor preferences and their divergence from firm priorities using earnings call transcripts. This measure, which we call the 'focus gap,' captures the difference in attention to a given topic between the Q&A, which proxies for investor priorities, and the firm's presentation, which reflects firm executives' priorities. We show that the focus gap predicts firm actions. Specifically, a one standard deviation increase in the dividend focus gap is associated with a 0.4 p.p., or 4%, increase in dividends paid as a percent of firm market value within two years. The analogous repurchase focus gap raises repurchases made as a percent of firm market value by 0.3 p.p., or 2%, within one year, but reverts to zero by two years after the focus gap increase. We then develop a conceptual framework that generates two possible rationales for responsiveness to investor pressure: catering to increase short-term stock prices and learning about long-run value. Variation in incentives to cater to analysts suggests that catering to raise stock prices, as opposed to learning, drives responsiveness to the focus gap for dividend issuance and repurchases. Consistent with this interpretation, we find that focus gap-driven capital allocation decisions are associated with temporary stock price increases followed by subsequent reversals.

  3. Margin or Mission? The Effects of CEOs on Hospital Outcomes (with Nagisa Tadjfar) [Draft available upon request]

Publications

  1. HiNT: a computational method for detecting copy number variations and translocations from Hi-C data (with Su Wang, Soohyun Lee, Chong Chu, Dhawal Jain, Peter Kerpedjiev, Geoffrey M. Nelson, Burak H. Alver & Peter J. Park)
    Genome Biology, 21(73), 2020
  2. High-resolution spectroscopic study of extremely metal-poor star candidates from the SkyMapper survey (with Heather R. Jacobson, Anna Frebel, José M. Peña, Qinsi Yu, Stefan Keller, Martin Asplund, Michael S. Bessell, Gary S. Da Costa, Anna F. Marino, John E. Norris, Brian P. Schmidt, Patrick Tisserand, David Yong, Andrew R. Casey, and Karin Lind)
    The Astrophysical Journal, 807(2), 2015
  3. Widespread Macromolecular Interaction Perturbations in Human Genetic Disorders (with Nidhi Sahni et al.)
    Cell, 161(3), 2015
  4. A Proteome-Scale Map of the Human Interactome Network (with Thomas Rolland et al.)
    Cell, 159(5), 2014