Welcome! My name is Andy Li, second-year PhD student in Finance at
University of Amsterdam and visiting researcher at the Dutch Central Bank.
Upcoming Events: SFS Cavalcade 2025, Entrepreneurial Finance PhD Summer Workshop.
Research Interests
Primary Field: Entrepreneurial Finance; Alternative Assets
Secondary Field: Sustainable Finance; Financial Intermediaries
I enjoy applying granular (administrative and hand-collected) data to answer aggregate questions, and combining empirical findings with theories.
Research
Do Development Financial Institutions Create Impact through Venture Capital Investments?
Working paper, joint with Aleksander Andonov and Paul Smeets
Scheduled Presentation(s): SFS Cavalcade NA 2025
Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) manage assets totaling $23 trillion, yet little research has been conducted on their investment activities and impact. We document that DFIs have increasingly invested in venture capital (VC) over the past three decades, participating as limited partners in one out of every six deals. We collect the mandates of DFIs and identify four main objectives they pursue through VC investments: building a VC ecosystem, supporting entrepreneurship and small and medium-sized enterprises, fostering innovation, and promoting sustainable business practices. We empirically test whether DFIs meet these objectives by addressing market failures, including externalities, information frictions, and coordination challenges. Our findings vary between developed and developing economies. In developing economies, DFIs are more likely to target industries with positive externalities, provide capital to underrepresented fund managers, and improve return transparency. However, they are less likely than conventional VC investors to support young funds or early-stage deals, and their investments have no significant impact on firm growth or innovation. In developed economies, we find little evidence that DFIs address market failures and have even more limited impact. Overall, our findings suggest that DFIs have significant room to enhance their impact by better addressing market failures, aligning investments with stated mandates, and embracing higher risk in their portfolios.
Environmental Protests against Banks
Work in progress, joint with Annick van Ool (Dutch Central Bank)
Research Grant: A Sustainable Future 2024 Fall
We document a global surge (n=478) in protests against banks for environmental causes. These protests increasingly express both climate and biodiversity concerns. This paper aims to study their impact on banks along three dimensions. In the short-run, we show that these protests, on average, do not have significant effects on banks’ stock prices. Next, we investigate the medium-run effects on banks’ environmental policy communicated in their annual reports using ChatGPT [The results for this part are forthcoming]. Third, we explore the long-term impacts on banks' lending practices using confidential loan-level data for all banks operating in the Euro Area. Our results show that these protests have no significant effect on banks' lending. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic study of protests targeting financial institutions. Overall, the real effects of civil disobedience on banks appear to be limited.
Education
Tinbergen Institute, University of Amsterdam
Mphil. Economics, 2021-2023
Track: Advanced Econometrics and Finance
GPA: 1/26
University of Groningen
Bsc. Econometrics and Operations Research, 2018-2021
Minor in Math
GPA: 2/147
Research Experience
Dutch Central Bank
Visiting researcher, 2023 -
Erasmus University Rotterdam
Research assistant in financial econometrics, Feb - Aug 2023
University of Amsterdam
Research assistant in macrofinance, Feb - June 2023
University of Groningen
Research assistant in econometrics, July - August 2022
Teaching Experience
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Fundamental Finance
First-year bachelor course, basic corporate finace and asset pricing
U. Amsterdam
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Corporate Finance
Second-year bachelor course for Economics and Business Economics
U. Amsterdam
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Multivariate Calculus
First-year bachelor course for Econometrics ans Operations Research
U. Groningen
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Actuarial Science
Two second-year bachelor courses, covering insurance and risk management.
U. Groningen
Thesis Supervision
I am actively looking to supervise ambitious bachelor and master students interested in research and/or learning more about one of the listed topics.
I have supervised 9 bachelor students and they all claim to have learnt a lot (hopefully not just out of politeness!). And I enjoyed it a lot as well! Please don’t hesitate to contact me for a coffee or online call if you are interested.
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Suggested reading:
Hall, B. H., & Lerner, J. (2010). The financing of R&D and innovation. InHandbook of the Economics of Innovation.
Acs, Z., Åstebro, T., Audretsch, D., & Robinson, D. T. (2016). Public policy to promote entrepreneurship: a call to arms. Small Business Economics.
Gompers, P. A., Gornall, W., Kaplan, S. N., & Strebulaev, I. A. (2020). How do venture capitalists make decisions? Journal of Financial Economics
Cunningham, C., Ederer, F., & Ma, S. (2021). Killer acquisitions. Journal of Political Economy
Ewens, M., Nanda, R., & Rhodes-Kropf, M. (2018). Cost of experimentation and the evolution of venture capital. Journal of Financial Economics
Botelho, T. L., Fehder, D., & Hochberg, Y. (2021). Innovation-driven entrepreneurship. National Bureau of Economic Research.
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Brad M. Barber, Adair Morse, and Ayako Yasuda (2021). Impact investing. Journal of Financial Economics
Shawn Cole, Leslie Jeng, Josh Lerner, Natalia Rigol, and Benjamin N. Roth (2023). What do impact investors do differently? National Bureau of Economic Research.
Jeffers, J., Lyu, T., & Posenau, K. (2023). The risk and return of impact investing funds. SSRN Electronic Journal.
Ye Zhang (2021). Impact investing and venture capital industry: Experimental evidence. SSRN Electronic Journal.
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Suggested reading:
Hellmann, T., & Puri, M. (2002). Venture capital and the professionalization of start‐up firms: Empirical evidence. The Journal of Finance
Kaplan, S. N., & Schoar, A. (2005). Private equity performance: Returns, persistence, and capital flows. The Journal of Finance
Kaplan, S. N., & Strömberg, P. (2009). Leveraged buyouts and private equity. Journal of Economic Perspectives
Davis, S. J., Haltiwanger, J., Handley, K., Jarmin, R., Lerner, J., & Miranda, J (2014). Private equity, jobs, and productivity. American Economic Review
Bernstein, S., Giroud, X., & Townsend, R. R. (2016). The impact of venture capital monitoring. The Journal of Finance
Supervisors
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Prof. Aleksander Andonov
Supervisor, Chair
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Prof. Enrico Perotti
Supervisor
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Prof. Paul Smeets
Supervisor