Jennifer M. Walsh

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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.

I study corporate governance using tools from industrial organization, financial economics, and public economics.

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

Working Papers

  1. Quantifying Investor Pressure. [SSRN]
    with Sarah Robinson

    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.

  2. How do nonprofits use cash windfalls? Evidence from $5B in unrestricted donations. [SSRN]

    How do nonprofits use unrestricted gifts? Donations to 501(c)(3)’s are increasingly given unrestricted due to concerns that restrictions on use unduly constrain nonprofits. I study the effect of such funding on recipients using a $5B sample of MacKenzie Scott’s gifts from 2019-2022 to 567 nonprofits. I find that, within two years of receiving the gift, nonprofits received 64% of the average gift in additional contributions and spent the entirety of the average gift compared to similar untreated nonprofits. After giving away 26% as grants to individuals and other nonprofits, recipients spent these funds proportionally to their previous activities. Two years after the gift, CEO compensation increased by $20.9K (9%), average director compensation increased by $12K (12.1%), and average compensation of non-senior employees increased by $2.7K (5.8%) compared to similar untreated nonprofits. For every dollar of unrestricted gift and additional contributions, the present value of executive compensation increased by $0.23. Recipient nonprofits do not become less constrained in allocating their revenue to indirect costs or savings. In sum, nonprofits that receive this set of unrestricted gifts do not behave in the hypothesized liquidity-constrained manner.

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

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, 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, 2015
  3. Widespread Macromolecular Interaction Perturbations in Human Genetic Disorders.
    with Nidhi Sahni, Song Yi, Mikko Taipale, Juan I Fuxman Bass, Jasmin Coulombe-Huntington, Fan Yang, Jian Peng, Jochen Weile, Georgios I Karras, Yang Wang, István A Kovács, Atanas Kamburov, Irina Krykbaeva, Mandy H Lam, George Tucker, Vikram Khurana, Amitabh Sharma, Yang-Yu Liu, Nozomu Yachie, Quan Zhong, Yun Shen, Alexandre Palagi, Adriana San-Miguel, Changyu Fan, Dawit Balcha, Amelie Dricot, Daniel M Jordan, Akash A Shah, Xinping Yang, Ani K Stoyanova, Alex Leighton, Michael A Calderwood, Yves Jacob, Michael E Cusick, Kourosh Salehi-Ashtiani, Luke J Whitesell, Shamil Sunyaev, Bonnie Berger, Albert-László Barabási, Benoit Charloteaux, David E Hill, Tong Hao, Frederick P Roth, Yu Xia, Albertha JM Walhout, Susan Lindquist, Marc Vidal
    Cell, 2014
  4. A Proteome-Scale Map of the Human Interactome Network.
    with Thomas Rolland, Murat Taşan, Benoit Charloteaux, Samuel J Pevzner, Quan Zhong, Nidhi Sahni, Song Yi, Irma Lemmens, Celia Fontanillo, Roberto Mosca, Atanas Kamburov, Susan D Ghiassian, Xinping Yang, Lila Ghamsari, Dawit Balcha, Bridget E Begg, Pascal Braun, Marc Brehme, Martin P Broly, Anne-Ruxandra Carvunis, Dan Convery-Zupan, Roser Corominas, Jasmin Coulombe-Huntington, Elizabeth Dann, Matija Dreze, Amélie Dricot, Changyu Fan, Eric Franzosa, Fana Gebreab, Bryan J Gutierrez, Madeleine F Hardy, Mike Jin, Shuli Kang, Ruth Kiros, Guan Ning Lin, Katja Luck, Andrew MacWilliams, Jörg Menche, Ryan R Murray, Alexandre Palagi, Matthew M Poulin, Xavier Rambout, John Rasla, Patrick Reichert, Viviana Romero, Elien Ruyssinck, Julie M Sahalie, Annemarie Scholz, Akash A Shah, Amitabh Sharma, Yun Shen, Kerstin Spirohn, Stanley Tam, Alexander O Tejeda, Shelly A Wanamaker, Jean-Claude Twizere, Kerwin Vega, Michael E Cusick, Yu Xia, Albert-László Barabási, Lilia M Iakoucheva, Patrick Aloy, Javier De Las Rivas, Jan Tavernier, Michael A Calderwood, David E Hill, Tong Hao, Frederick P Roth, Marc Vidal
    Cell, 2014