Speaker: Bingxuan Lin, Professor, University of Rhode Island
Time: 14:30 p.m., March 11, 2026
Venue: Room 105, Building 12, Wushan Campus
Biography
Bingxuan Lin is a Professor of Finance at the University of Rhode Island. He is also the holder of the William H. Eigen Endowed Professor in Finance. He received his Ph.D. from Georgia State University in 2001. His research focuses on corporate finance, agency theory, and the Chinese capital market.
Professor Lin has published over 50 papers in top-tier domestic and international academic journals, including British Accounting Review, Accounting Horizons, the Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, Journal of Business Finance & Accounting, Economic Research Journal, Journal of Management Sciences in China, Journal of Financial Research, and Accounting Research. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Accounting and Public Policy and China Journal of Accounting Research. In the past, Professor Lin was appointed as a distinguished guest professor at Sun Yat-sen University, and the Chinese University of Mining and Technology. He currently serves as a Distinguished Professor at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Capital University of Economics and Business, and Ocean University of China.
Abstract
In the United States, mandatory reporting and market concerns force managers to speak even during periods of turmoil. We examine how managers respond to this constraint by changing the locus of risk attribution in Management’s Discussion and Analysis. Using large language model embeddings and supervised neural network learning, we construct a disclosure-implied systematic risk share (SRS) that links narrative semantics to the systematic component of post-disclosure return variance. We find that political uncertainty causes a “hiding in the herd” response, where managers increasingly attribute risk to market-wide headwinds rather than firm-specific factors. We validate that SRS tracks the structural source of risk using a mirror-image test: when political shocks are firm-specific (i.e., the U.S.-China trade war), attribution shifts to idiosyncratic factors, thereby reducing SRS. The use of systematic attribution is exacerbated by short-term reporting pressure and poor monitoring and is mainly driven by salient policy debates in trade and healthcare.
