Jiahao Lin and Karan Bhasin Win the 2024 Pong S. Lee Award

The Department is pleased to announce that Jiahao Lin and Karan Bhasin have been awarded the 2024 Pong S. Lee Award for outstanding third-year Ph.D. research papers. 

Jiahao Lin's paper, "Can Mutual Fund 'Stars' Really Pick Stocks? New Evidence from a Wild Bootstrap Analysis," proposes a method to evaluate mutual fund performance. His research introduces a novel wild bootstrap-based approach that addresses limitations in existing methodologies. The method accounts for some key features of mutual fund data bases, such as missing data and cross-sectional information, and demonstrates superior size accuracy and greater power compared to standard bootstrap techniques. His research also proposes a strategy for identifying top-performing mutual funds and presents empirical evidence that a significant portion of mutual funds  outperform the market.

Karan Bhasin's paper, "Inattention, Disagreement and Uncertainty in Macroeconomic Expectations: The Indian Experience during 2007-2023," studies the expectation formation procedure. Using Indian data, his research reveals that demographic factors play a limited role in explaining household expectation biases and that substantial cross-sectional variation in price movements contributes to diverse inflation experiences among households. The paper proposes a novel strategy for sample separation into attentive and inattentive households, identifying inattention as a major contributor to the aggregate bias in household inflation expectations.

Please join us in congratulating Jiahao and Karan on their outstanding achievement.