Thu Nguyen Wins 2024 Best PhD Paper at 7th Asset Pricing Conference

Thu was awarded the prize for her job market paper, titled "Market Concentration, Capital Misallocation, and Asset Pricing". In this paper, she empirically studies the asset pricing implications of superstar firms, defined by their large size and market power, through the channel of capital misallocation. She finds that higher capital misallocation between superstar and non-superstar firms predicts lower economic growth and aggregate stock returns. Consistent with the ICAPM framework, capital misallocation between superstar and non-superstar firms is a key state variable and its shocks carry a negative price of risk in the cross-section of stock

The 7th Asset Pricing Conference by LTI@UniTO is a one-day conference hosted by the Collegio Carlo Alberto, Italy and took place on Tuesday, October 8, 2024. The conference aims to promote the highest level and up-to-date research in asset pricing within the European academic community. Speakers and discussants are selected among the most innovative junior researchers and established scholars. One presentation slot is devoted to the PhD candidate for the best paper in Asset Pricing. Thu Nguyen was this year's winner of this slot. She received a discussion from Fabio Trojani (University of Geneva, Swiss Finance Institute and University of Torino) during the conference and was awarded a prize of €500.

Thu Nguyen is on the 2024/2025 academic job market. She is a Tinbergen Institute research master graduate (2021) and currently a PhD candidate in Finance at the University of Amsterdam, under the supervision of research fellow Aleksandar Andonov, Arnoud Boot and Esther Eiling (University of Amsterdam).

Her research focuses on empirical asset pricing, specifically how macroeconomic impacts of firms and how institutional investors’ demand affect asset pricing.

Read more on her personal website.